iGaming Daily

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Hello and welcome to another episode of iGaming Daily live from the floor of the Canadian Gaming Summit. I am Jessica Wellman, editor of SPC Americas and Canadian Gaming Business, joined by project director for SPC, Martin Elliott. Martin, I don't think we've done a pod together. I think we... it might even have been a trial, you know, before when we were testing it. yeah, yeah. Yeah. No, I was getting the impression you've been ignoring me on this.

Well, it's just, you know, you get like, we're just in our little Thursday groove, Charlie and I, so it works.

And this is exactly why it works because with you and I, it's something different and I have forgotten to do the very important thing, which is plug our podcast sponsor OptiMove. OptiMove, the number one CRM marketing solution for the iGaming market. 56 % of the EGR Power 50 customized player experiences with OptiMove. First three months, still up for grabs. Go check that out at optimove .com forward slash SBC. With that out of the way, how has your

been so far? Yeah it's been interesting, it's my first time in Canada and it's true what everyone says about the people, they are the politest people I've ever come across, so that's been nice. I think the conference element of the event has been really really strong, been a lot of interesting discussions, particularly things like advertising.

and responsible gambling so it's all been very, very positive I think. How about you? Because I know you've been, you were moderating a panel yesterday. Yes, I moderated one on iGaming Innovation, had five really great panelists from Pichu, I always get that wrong. Pichu, Betty, Bet MGM, Play.

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Anywhere I'm gonna get these wrong because there are too many De La Sport There is a big panel, but really good and like last panel of the day So you're always a little worried people won't show up, but Canadians love conference content it seems so It was a good one, and it was a good discussion. You know I think our big focus of this was talking about engagement and how you capture customer attention and keep them engaged, but also just thinking about that beyond just

I'm a casino competing against other casinos, but I'm a casino competing against TikTok, Netflix, having a life with your friend, you know, like, and framing the discussion a little bit differently. Okay, that's interesting. So I moderated a very, a panel on a similar theme at our event in Malta last month.

And one of the ideas that came up in that is one of the guys said, I think the big change we'll see in the next 10 years is there'll be no operators in their current format. People will just be able to, talking about casinos specifically, not sports book. So people will just be able to go to something like...

the App Store or the Google Play, download the games they want, play directly with the suppliers and there'll be no competition for operators and so on in there. He took it a bit further, he said, and I think people will then be able to act as their own affiliate to bring their friends on board to these games and so on. I want to thought about it, I thought, yeah, that all makes perfect sense. It's fair to say some of the other panelists disagreed with this idea.

largely around the fact of regulation and who's going to do the responsible gambling and you know would Apple or Google want another regulatory headache of getting involved in the gambling industry you know their solicitors their lawyers are pretty busy as it is it's fair to say so yeah so that really came out of the outside field and

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was not what I was expecting, not where I was expecting the discussion to go. So it sounds like yours was a bit more... No, I mean we had some moments like that. Tony from P .S .U. was saying like for younger audiences he's just like...

What gambling games are going to look like for them as we as they get a little bit older It's gonna bear no resemblance to a slot machine. You know, it's like the crash game is the tip of the iceberg of creating ways for them to gamble in a way that is More what they're interested in. I mean it almost sounded a little bit more like like an arcade afication of yeah that

resonates a little bit with me. I think I'll be, I'm not a great player of slots. Most of my gambling is sports betting, but I could see something like a three point shootout game where you play in a pool bet type thing. Everyone sticks in $5 and then, cause that's the kind of thing people sort of do at home over a few beers as well already. So,

I can see that working, those kind of taking ideas from video gaming a bit more than we do currently. Yeah, I mean, I've seen like way back in the day, there was this whole moment of like skill based slots where it was like you would play a game of Pac -Man and then how well you did in Pac -Man would determine how big your bonus spin would be. And that never, they were on the casino floor in Vegas, they never quite caught on. But then,

And then I see some that I'm like, this is freaking genius. Like the claw machines that are just like have money inside the little bubbles and things like that. Like, I'm like, that's good. I don't know why we didn't think of that one sooner. There is plenty of room for some quite big changes and it might be a generational shift because we know the younger generation, probably more so than...

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any generational change before, consumes media in a different way, consumes games in a different way to previously, and their lives have been digital first all the way through, so they expect new ideas to come around all the time. Whereas what you tend to see in the iGaming world is there are maybe, I don't know, a hundred slot releases a week maybe, or certainly several hundred a month.

A lot of them are very, very similar. And I'm being quite polite about that. A lot of them are exactly the same, would be another way to phrase that. And it seems that the older generation of players, probably people my age, are quite happy with that. They like familiarity and so on. But I think in 10 years' time, you'll be trying to sell to a generation who have...

who are more used to change and demand change all the time. That familiarity won't be as fun for them. So we'll say it pans out, but I'll be retired by then. We'll see if the pace of innovation can keep up with that. I mean, it's just such a tough industry to innovate in because everything you do has to go be like GLI tested in a lab and things like that. It's complicated to just roll out a brand new idea every week. It is in the regulated sector. The huge advantage that...

crypto casinos have is that they're almost all offshore in most markets so there's less regulation and they don't want to praise the unregulated sector because I think they you know one of the great saving graces of the industry is that contribution to tax and jobs onshore and so on but actually the player experience on some of those crypto casinos having done a little bit of research around it recently.

It's really good. If you take some of those regulations away, and the regulations are there for good reason, generally speaking. But yeah, the things you can do in that environment are really pretty impressive. So I think the regulated industry has to think a little bit about that, see what lessons it can learn. And the regulators have to think a little bit about that because...

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Otherwise you will just see a slide to the better. It's not about...

You know, I'm being a rebel, I'm playing somewhere where it's not taxed or I'm doing something that's a bit wrong. It's just solely about that customer experience that they're able to offer. And we will see a slide away there, I think, of players unless some of those features are brought onto the regulated market. Yeah, it's a tough balance to strike. Absolutely. I mean, it's very difficult to just go to the...

for the operators to go to the regulator and say, we want to do this because offshore casino with wrapper as their front man is doing this and is taking our business. That's not an argument a regulator will listen to, but at some point.

maybe they'll have to start listening to it. I mean, in the US, I'll be honest, like, the operators won't shut up about the black market. And it's, I've written some op -eds about this, like it's, it's not landing right anymore because of how they're framing it. It's, hey, we should have to pay less taxes. We should not be subject to as many rules because we have to compete with the black market. It's like the boogeyman.

at this point where it's just like, you know, and if I were a regular, I wouldn't listen to that argument either. It's like, no, you agreed to come in here and you agreed to follow rules and there's a reason that you are better than the black market and that reason is this. So arguing that this needs to be more lax is kind of counterintuitive. Yeah, I mean, the actual argument is the offshore operators need to be bought into the regulated market. It's not we should cut taxes for regulated market.

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I don't think that, nobody, none of those operators are going to be like, bring the offshores, clean them up, yeah. But if the regulators really wanted to go after the offshore, there are ways they can do that. In particular, you know, if you were to classify payments to an unlicensed casino as an illegal payment, then how are...

actually better not name anybody in particular, but are the payments providers. If they are facilitating illegal payments, then surely you just need to cut that route out. Well that's what UIGIA is in the United States, the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act from 2006.

2007, 2007 is it doesn't make gambling explicitly illegal. It made the financial transaction illegal and payment processors were named in it. So you make a good point there.

That's unusual for me, so that's good. I'm curious, you know, you mentioned advertising earlier. I think we've heard a lot about advertising. You haven't been to Canada before. Is this for you as someone who's been in the industry a long time, like, it's your turn to have this debate? It is a little bit. I do think Ontario has been fairly smart. I think its regulations are good. They are.

They are tough but they are workable which is probably the sweet spot that you want to be hitting. So that's good. I have noticed that in one or two ads on TV, not a lot, but more prevalent social media. When I turned on Twitter to quick scroll through to see, essentially just having a look at.

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people taking the mickey about how bad all the candidates are in our general election in the UK but the number of gambling ads targeted at me because I was in Toronto unbelievable on that it's way in excess of what you see in the in the UK so I just wondered if that is something they haven't got right

Yeah, you know, we'll have an interview with Amanda Brewer from CGA up next week and she and I talk a bit about like this whole push in Canada. There's that Senate bill to limit or prohibit TV advertising.

I think it's because, and this is in the US too, the push behind these things are coming from people that are just not gamblers and annoyed it's on their television all the time. Whereas, you know, social media, somebody has to...

Detect that you're a person interested in this before the algorithm serves you these things you have to follow these accounts before you really see so I think there's just less outrage behind it, but I totally agree because I've done some like research around the marketplace a couple years ago for a project if you're following some of these major or these operator accounts you're getting dozens of tweets a day and some of them

Because it's like a young kid who has not been properly like RG trained, the biggest...

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the closest view so the biggest issue with social media i think too is that the social media managers are relatively young people who have not been properly are g -trained or sensitivity train so it's like i mean the tweets i see just blow my mind late

tweets that are just like you know a meme of someone like literally shaking and like what happens when I have nothing to bet on today and I'm like good god how did nobody flag this and take this down but it's very common in the US and

In Canada less so because they have, most of the operators have like separate accounts for Canada because of the inducement ban. So their US accounts just can't cross over. But it's still a problem here as well. Yeah, I think if the industry and the regulators wanted to have a proper conversation about it, they should be a little bit more data driven on how that conversation is.

There is a perception that you see gambling emphasising all the time, particularly on television and radio and so on.

I'm not sure that's actually true. I mean, as someone who works in the industry, I notice it a lot. But I don't think it's a problem in terms of the volume itself. That's the problem. You might argue about some of the messaging and some of the use of, obviously not in Canada, but some of the use of celebrity ambassadors and so on in some of the markets. But the volume of ads on broadcast is A,

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not the problem people perceive it to be and B, it's also real easy to deal with. In the UK, the BGC, which is the trade body for the big operators, got together and put in some voluntary regulation, which meant they advertised a little bit less and they did a little bit more responsible gaming advertising in there. They spent a certain percentage of their budget on that and the fact they toned it down a little,

I mean it's not noticeably toned down, but things like not having any advertising in the breaks at half time in a football match. They all agreed to that, so that's a big thing. Obviously, at any point in that football match, you will see on the digital display advertising in the ground itself lots of betting advertising, although often for Vietnamese or Filipino operators that you can't access in the UK really anyway.

But that saw off in the gambling app review. The regulators, the politicians, decided, actually, we don't need to do anything about advertising. The industry has proved itself to be responsible. So there are ways around the headline problem. But also, I think, as we just talked about, it does need a more data -driven approach to look at the volume and, you're right, about the content on social media as well.

and some proper regulation around that. I mean, my guess is that a lot of the people who work at the regulators are maybe my age, and social media is very much a third or fourth consideration in this stuff. Yeah, you've got to crack the problem of television first, I guess. To go back to that data point, too, I say this to my team all the time, because you'll see a lot of surveys. There was one.

It was like the CAC, like a news channel and some researchers did one on advertising here where they claimed, you know, there were like some obscene number of advertising or like gambling at, but basically like take a basketball game and the floor has a sports book in the court. It was like, if you had a shot where a camera shot where there was a bit on the floor that counted.

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is one. If the other team then ran down to the other side of the court and the camera panned and then the next time they were back on their end of the court, that was two. You know, so these like incredibly passive things. So I always tell Tom and Justin, I'm like, if you do not go and look at the methodology of what this report is before you write about it, I will be so angry with you because the methodology in a lot of these things.

can be kind of flawed. Or not even necessarily flawed, but you need to know what it actually is and how they measured it. Yeah, and that often comes from who commissioned the piece of research to do it. Exactly. That's how you do it. So you have to take everything and that, and as an industry we do tend to fund some research that is very positive about the industry, which probably is also.

a little bit skewed because of the way the questions are asked and the way the data is collected and so on. But yeah, I mean some of those surveys around advertising are ludicrous. I think there was one in the UK that measured how many times during a soccer match you would see a gambling advert. And it came up to me, I can't remember what it was now, but I think it was more than a thousand. And actually...

you're not because the way the digital display boards work in the stadium at some point for 10 seconds or 15 seconds you'll see one brand in the whole stadium full of it so on TV you might see that one logo in that period 200 times and then that would come like that would happen maybe five times in a game so then you get notes it's a thousand it's not a thousand you've seen one you've seen one.

in my book. Yeah, I mean, it obviously has to work somewhat or these sports teams wouldn't be able to sell these things, but as someone who watches a decent amount of sports, like I can't, I know there's a Bet MGM logo behind the plate at Red Stadium, but like I can't, I couldn't tell you what all the ads were. And I know that I've never said to myself, that's...

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thing sounds interesting. I'm gonna go buy that because it was you know a logo slap behind in a sports stadium. I think probably getting back to the the old the old debate we used to have about tobacco advertising in Formula One where the tobacco companies also yeah we're not talking new customers we're only targeting switches and I and I can see why people who are opposed to

gambling and gambling advertising would think that's a weak argument. But I also think it's probably a correct one. If you don't know what FanDuel is and you see the FanDuel logo in the background of a ball game or whatever, it doesn't mean anything to you. So you're not immediately going to stick several thousand dollars on the next play, are you? It's just...

it doesn't work like that. Yeah, last point on this. It's also like we've done so many of these measuring how many spots there are. What we haven't seen research on is.

Do people gamble more because they are seeing more advertising on television? I don't think I've even seen correlation, let alone causation studies that tell you that's the case in the slightest. I'm guessing if there was some research out there that proved that, the broadcasters would be really keen to promote that research and sell some more ad space to gambling companies. But who knows? Perhaps I'm just being cynical about that. Well...

that's something we do have in common. So glad that we got to sync up and share our side -eyed disdain for certain aspects of the industry. All right, enjoy the rest of your trip to Toronto. Martin, you guys, for those of you here at CGS, you still have one more day. Or well, by the time this is up, probably not one more day, but thank you for joining us in Toronto. Thank you for joining us on air. And be sure to keep tuning in to iGaming Daily for all the latest and greatest online gambling news.