iGaming Daily

Andrew McCarron (00:00.098)
Hello and welcome to the iGaming Daily podcast supported by OptiMove. Today we're focusing on the 2025 iGaming AI trends, predictions and challenges, which is a hot topic as we enter a new era of heightened player expectations and rapidly advancing technologies. Joining us is Marty Coleman, the VP of revenue marketing for iGaming at OptiMove. How are you doing today? Why I've not seen you since Lisbon. Everything good? Yeah, it's good. Nice to see you. Nice to be back.

talking to you again. Everything is incredibly busy and wonderfully stressful, but for all the right reasons. So yeah, can't complain. Yeah. When we was having a little discussion before we went live, your colleague Guy said, let's not mention the Lisbon Benfica football tournament, but shall we mention it just for him? Well, we can. We can, if you want. I think that we were harshly placed in a group of only three different teams.

with only the top team going through. And after we lost the first game narrowly 2-1, that was it. We were out of the tournament. So we managed to win our second game, but it was largely irrelevant. It was over before it started, but it was nice to get the free football kits and it was an amazing experience to be around the stadium as well. all in all a good day, just a lesser on the football side. Yeah. I always, always loved doing the SBC championships. One for the kids because it's pretty fantastic. But also just to play against...

people that you talk to, cause I normally talk to people on kind of a business case, you know, and it's nice to just be on the pitch and talk personal with them and maybe a little bit of banter as well. Yeah. get a bit that, don't you? We've got a lot to dive into. So I think let's get straight into it and let's kind of set the stage of what we're to talk about. Cause obviously to know what's going to happen in 2025, we need to know what's happened in the past. And more importantly, what is current and like in the present and the i-gaming landscape, it's always been.

dynamic, but it feels like we're now on the brink of something transformative. today, they expect this experience that mirrors the thrill of a live casino or sports book. And they want that personalized seamless interaction and they want operators to know them. the challenge, but you know, what is the challenge? Like players are so quick to quit if their experience kind of falls short of their expectations and switching operators is easier than it's ever been.

Andrew McCarron (02:21.036)
And they're not shy about chasing luck or leaving behind a platform that feels stale. So Marty, how has kind of OptiMove responded to that shift and just give me the scene as it is today. Yeah, it's a really interesting topic because it's the foundation upon which our business was built. And I don't think we realized that we were building it for this, but yeah, we're going back 12 years now. OptiMove was doing some, well actually it was called Mobius at the time. It was a consultancy business and we were

We were building out reports on behalf of businesses and trying to help them identify who their customers were and how to talk to their customers in a smarter way, which is the very, very nascent beginnings of what you're talking about now. In 2012, we productized that and built Optimove. We also didn't do it on behalf of the iGaming industry, but it just happened in 2012 in Tel Aviv. The iGaming industry was booming here. I myself was working for William Hill at the time.

We had Labbrooks out here, we had 888 out here, and many other businesses spawned out of it. So often we've had a very easy go-to-market strategy to pick up those sort of operators. And we realized that we had a product that suited the iGaming space very well. And it's for all the reasons that you just described, which is that even then players had a very clear understanding that they wanted to be spoken to in a personalized way. And that the reality of the iGaming industry is that by and large, it's a homogeneous product.

A better man united to better man united. Yes, there's a price differential. Yes, there is the experience that the customer receives on site. That's one way of differentiating operator A from operator B, but CRM as a concept and personalization as a way of getting there has always been one of the fundamental building blocks inside of the iGaming industry. so the way that we always approach the situation, which was by focusing on the customer, trying to help our clients understand who the customer was.

has always been a winning formula. And so, you know, I think one of the things I said to you last time we spoke was OptiMove was always doing AI before it was cool. And it was a bit of a throwaway comment, but I mean, it is kind of what it was, you know, that is what we've been doing. At the heart of what AI is, what machine learning is, it's a set of algorithms. It's a set of mathematical equations that allows a business to understand their customers in a smarter way.

Andrew McCarron (04:44.802)
Now AI as a concept, and we'll talk about it a lot more today, it's then spawned out in many different ways, but at the core of what it was for us, what it's always been for us, has always been helping our clients identify who the customer is and then helping them talk to that customer in a very personalized manner. Because if we go back to this idea of the homogeneity and the ease of switching between different companies, a customer's relationship

with the brand and their experience, what happens when they lose. It's a very emotional business that we're connected to. Being able to talk to your customers in a way that they want to be spoken to is fundamental. That's always been how we've thought about things. And of course we've developed many different ways of approaching that over the years, but at its core DNA, it's kind of the way that we've always imagined this world. Yeah. And you said it again.

And I always do love that phrase. You did it before you were cool. And it's true AI, AI isn't new and it isn't new to iGaming. And for yourselves, you've embedded this AI. think it was 2012 you've embedded AI. But it's the past 12 to 18 months that the pace of AI evolution has kind of skyrocketed recently, certainly within iGaming. And it kind of takes me a bit to, you know, OptiMove, OptiGenie and the Target Group Discovery, for example, like these tools.

they allow operators to connect with players in a way that probably two years ago probably wouldn't even been possible. Can you just share how these innovations are reshaping engagement for players out there and operators? Yeah, for sure. I mean, let's take, firstly, OptiGenie from our perspective is the rebranding of anything AI kind of housed under one umbrella. One of the tools you mentioned there, Target Group Discovery.

What we've always allowed our clients to do is to segment their customer base in a very, very deep and meaningful way. But nonetheless, there was always a lot of pressure or impetus on the marketing manager themselves to have a clear vision of what the customer group should be without necessarily being able to attach that to an empirical value to say that this is an interesting group of customers. Should I segment the customers because they're men and women? Should I segment the customers because they're

Andrew McCarron (07:12.515)
One prefers football versus one prefers betting on basketball. Or is it based on a set of financial constraints? it the amount of players deposit or the number of deposits they make in a week? So we still always have put the power in the hands of the marketing manager to kind of come up with this idea. What AI allows us to do on behalf of the customer in accordance with the customer is to actually make suggestions.

to the user, to the end user, the marketing manager, to the CRM team, to say, here's an interesting group of players. Have you thought about segmenting the customer on only having a look at the number of deposits they make in a week? And the reason that we'll make that suggestion is because we will run an analysis that says all your customers that are depositing over three and a half times a week.

have a risk of churn of 8 % for all of your customers that are depositing under three and a half times a week have a risk of churn of 40%. We might discover that there is a really deep layer of segmentation that has a massive impact on the eventual performance of the customer itself. And so by making these recommendations to the marketing manager, they can actually focus and target their marketing plan based around the key factors in the player journey.

the underlying player, the underlying customers actually experiencing and in doing so being able again to talk to the customer in the right way. But you're focusing on the right areas of impetus there. So rather than building out 20 different segments this week and 19 of them are actually irrelevant, saying to the end user, these are the areas that you should focus on. of course, within that target group discovery allows you to then break it down further and further and further until you find the exact type of group.

that's going to have the biggest impact on whatever KPI you're looking to maximize. So I think that that's a very tangible way of helping the marketing team. And I think that that comment of tangible is actually why AI over the last 18 months has become a hot topic. I actually 21, 20 years ago, I was supposed to do my degree in mathematics in AI and I pulled out of it.

Andrew McCarron (09:26.896)
a few weeks before because I was terrified of the concept. But AI is not new. It's further back than 2012 and optimum if we're using it. So why suddenly in the last 18 months? I think sort of chat GPT accelerated that for everyone. But why? Why is that so fascinating to people? think because it's tangible. I think because if you use the words like AI, and again, this kind of goes back to something. Over the last 10 years, I've told my sales team never to use the word AI.

Don't pitch something as, you know, OptiMove's AI first. Explain to somebody what that means. Show them how it actually benefits them. I think that with what ChatGPT have done over the last year, two years or so, people actually realize firsthand, this is exactly, this is an application that I can exactly use that benefits my life in this exact way, et cetera, et cetera. So I think that the explosion of AI recently,

has been about making that functionality tangible to people. from us, target group discovery was certainly a way that we kind of put the, put all of that ability into the user's And finally on kind of the setting the scene stage. And after this, we're to go to a quick ad break, but let's touch on the marketers. Let's, let's narrow down or specifically focus on them with AI kind of breaking down traditional silos. We're seeing

arise and this is something OptiMov has done with their positionless marketer. They're not just email specialists or kind of ad managers. They're strategists with a holistic view of kind of the player's journey. How do you see this shift influencing marketing teams? You've kind of already touched on it a little bit, but if you can just delve a bit more into that for the marketers. Yeah, sure. So the idea of the positionless marketer is to say that

in 2024, you shouldn't be siloed within whatever role you're doing in life. We have the ability to be smarter than the one job that we've been given to do. Now, if you take the role of the marketer, what are all the different aspects that are connected to that person being able to achieve the goal, which is to get a campaign out the door ultimately? Well, there's a lot of different factors there. There's the segmentation. So where are they going to get the segmentation from? They might have to write, you know,

Andrew McCarron (11:51.408)
off to their data analytics team to come back and provide them with a group of customers. There's the post campaign analysis. So they might have the data analysis team again, but after the campaign, you've got the creative team that's writing up the different templates. You've got an email provider over there that you've got to send emails out to, and you've got to give them lists of who gets what. I'm just shortening the chain. But there are so many different aspects in

what it takes to get a campaign out the door, that pigeonholing the marketer into one of those simple tasks. And that's kind of what it becomes making them a task manager. It doesn't, it doesn't get the most out of the individual people working in the organization. And, and one of the things that I think that AI has done for the individual people that are working is it gives them the ability to very, very quickly to do multiple jobs at the same time. So.

they can create templates very, very quickly. They can write a prompt into a chat GPT that then says, need, please write an email that is for the Ascot this weekend. There is a 10 % off offer, whatever it is. You just give them kind of a three bullet points and it comes up with an entire template. So you can do the content yourself. You can do the same thing again for the creative. So this idea of a positionless marketer,

is a nice vision because it allows employees, it allows people to be more than the silo that they've been given. But it's the capability being able to achieve that has to be done by smart tooling that shortens the time to value. Because if it still takes that one individual person the time of eight people to do that job, then you'd get eight people to do that job. Perfect. We are going to take a quick ad break, but when we get back, Moti, you've mentioned ChatGPT.

I don't know why this is coming to my head. Maybe a bit of fun for the ad break. But listeners, you have to guess where me and Marty first heard of ChatGPT or seen ChatGPT and we'll reveal it after the break. Welcome back. So before the break, I tried to do something a little fun, something a little different that we don't do. And it's let you guess where me and Marty first heard or witnessed ChatGPT. Marty, I'll go first because I've put us in this awful position. And I first heard of ChatGPT.

Andrew McCarron (14:16.4)
not in a work environment, not in a professional environment, but it was from, can't say it's a cartoon because it's an 18 plus, but an animated show, South Park, when they did their episode on ChatGPT. And I think the last two to three minutes of the show was actually ChatGPT generated with the script. So my insight from South Park, and I didn't even believe it would go as far as it did today, but Martin? For me, well, as an English person working in an Israeli company, I'm often the person

relied upon to write English properly for other members of the teams. Um, and at some point, one of my, one of my bosses produced an email that was perfect and wonderful and well beyond, um, his capabilities in English. when I, when I expressed my excitement with the extent to which he he improved his vocabulary and writing skills. was,

probably explained to what chat GPT was. So yeah, that was, that was really my first exposure to it. And actually I hadn't necessarily realized all the different ways that it's grown in that, in that way. But I spoke to my sister recently and her nieces are doing GCSEs. I mean, she told me that there's no such thing as coursework anymore. You know, I used to have to do, I used to have to do, yeah, it's only exam based. and, I asked them why.

You know, of course you have to do like the big projects and stuff. And she said, it doesn't happen anymore because you could get all the answers on chat GPT and it's too painstaking for anybody to test what's been written by AI and what hasn't. So in most schooling systems now they're just getting kids to just answer questions in live, in real time, in exams so no one can cheat. I I'll quickly run over that because that's interesting.

we've got some of the stuff we need to talk about, but that surprised me. Cause I mean, certainly in a creative profession, like I'm in, the coursework side of things was that hands-on experience, which is the first kind of entry that you'd have into engaging with myself as a journalist, know, creating a new story, creating a news bulletin, a radio piece, a news package. And you just don't, it doesn't really replicate an exam. There's my thoughts on that one. But the reason I kind of, I did that.

Andrew McCarron (16:39.066)
kind of silly question is it us an insight of kind of, again, where AI came from, where we first experienced it. Mine was an animated show. Yours was from a work colleague who mastered English in the space of 24 hours. And where it's come from today and where it's moved to today, like ChatGPT from when it was the shell of itself by then to it is now, it's still very different. It can do so much more. It can do video, it can do audio.

It can do coding to a great extent as well. And that gives us a pathway now into the second half, but let's shift to it. AI, it's set to refine iGaming over the next few years. And Marty, I'd just love to get your thoughts on some predictions for 2025. I'm going to try and go through six. So first up, prediction one is personalisation as the key differentiator. AI's already tailors its game recommendations on offers based on players' behaviour, but by 2025, how advanced will this become? More, not fully.

I always forget whether it was Minority Report or iRobot as the right example for when I think it was either Tom Cruise or Will Smith was walking past the wall in a shop and the advert comes up in front of him and it's purely personalized exactly to him. It might even be showing him wearing the clothes in the shop. I can't remember exactly what it was, but like it was like, know, what life looks like in 2050. So I don't think we're all the way.

I don't think we're all the way there yet, but I think that from a personalized experience, this is the beginning of a very, very strong charge towards that because, you like you said, they're game recommendations. I think, I bet recommendations is even more interesting than game recommendations because game recommendations, content slots that can be moved around, you know, like a widget, like a Netflix version. But I think that a bet recommendation can be...

really, really fascinating. I think that the world of betting has so many different options for an individual customer that it can be quite overwhelming, especially for some of the more junior people that are starting out their time, having a bet on things. And I think that bet recommendations is a really, really exciting space to move into. So I think the bet recommendations, I'm hoping to see the bet recommendations becomes the place that AI really drives personalization.

Andrew McCarron (18:59.312)
Next prediction, AI orchestrated gamification. Gamification is and always has been a big trend within the sector. How will AI transform this aspect of our gaming? Look, gamification is the hot topic right now. And I think it's a really, really interesting space. I think that, you know, kind of where gamification could be really interesting is on the reward side, is making sure that the right rewards are going to the customer in the right, at the right place at the right time. I think that a huge part of, if we include

gamification under the umbrella of personalization, which is really where it sits inside. I think one of the biggest problems that CRM teams and operators have had more generally is on bonus cost. And I think that bonus cost optimization will be a massive, massive money saver for businesses that will drive real uplifts in NGR over the coming years. And I think that that will come through.

from AI driven orchestration through gamification. think, you know, making sure that the right rewards are being received by the customers, I think is a huge part of it. Another one, which is a growing priority for everyone in the iGame in space, responsible gambling measures. How will AI help operators meet regulatory demands and more importantly, protect players? In terms of regulatory demands, it's very difficult to say because the regulator never tells us exactly what is required. So it's always a question of

show it, making sure the operators are seen to be doing enough because ultimately nobody can define what a problem gambler is. My problem gambling and your problem gambling are two very different things. Where I think AI can really help though is, well, I'm going to be very biased and think about it through the OptiMove lens, but it's on customer identification, which is to work alongside an operator and to build out your own definition of what you believe a problem gambler looks like.

And then to try and model that behavior on a much further back point in time so that you can predict where it's going to occur. So as these prediction models become more more accurate, you should be able to capture a much earlier stage where problem gambling is starting to arise by looking at things like the player heating up as their deposit rates are increasing over a specific period of time, plus whatever other variables you want to add into the mixture as well. But hoping that the AI will help.

Andrew McCarron (21:21.767)
The operators predict at very early stage when problem gambling is starting to arise. Perfect. So one more question. Challenges 2025, this whole thing is about me looking to the future and no innovation is without a challenge. So what might hold back AI's expansion in iGaming in the next 12 months? In my very cynical mind, it would be the fact that everybody's telling you that what they're doing is AI driven and you know, it's...

Again, AI is or could be a buzzword. Everybody is currently selling every single piece of technology and it's now AI driven. Everybody's raising money against companies that are AI focused. I'm not entirely sure that that's perfectly accurate. And I think that as the market's flooded with in inverted commas, AI led technology, people, buyers, operators will make a lot of mistakes on buying technologies that aren't very real.

I'm to plug what we've done a little bit. You know, we've been at it for a very, very long period of time. And so to us, it's not something new that we've just suddenly chucked into the tool to show off as a marketing exercise. So, you know, as a, health warning, whether it's OptiMove or anything else, make sure that you're buying an AI tool that actually is, is what it says it is. That's a good one. I didn't expect to say that. I think my, 2025 potential hurdle or challenge.

is regulatory challenges. think just as more advanced as AI gets, their algorithms are getting how to integrate that advanced AI into what is going to be outdated infrastructures. Probably are outdated at the moment, to be honest, let alone in the next 12 months. That'll be one of the biggest challenges, I think, is trying to integrate that technology in a regulatory space. Marty, this has been great. We've just continued where we left off in Lisbon. So was nice. Thank you for joining us today on the episode.

for listeners out there, if you've enjoyed the discussion as much as I have, we will leave links in the description below to take you to more information from OptiMove, what they do and any relevant articles that are on the SBC roster of news websites. And you can tune in tomorrow for more iGaming Daily. Until then, thank you and goodbye.