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A daily podcast delving into the biggest stories of the day throughout the sports betting and igaming sector.
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But the system can help you really optimize for whatever KPI that you're optimizing for. So you can relax your constraints and say, it's fine. It's OK. So journeys overlap. The system will find the best one for each customer and make sure that their experience is consistent, that they're optimizing for lifetime value. um And this is where AI can really help you. Good morning and welcome to the iGaming Daily. I'm Joe Sreeti, your host, the editor of iGamingExpert.com. This episode is brought to you by OptiMove, the creator of positionless marketing and the number one player engagement solution for iGaming and sports betting operators. Learn how OptiMove's positionless marketing is changing how iGaming teams operate. Discover how operators are using OptiMove's positionless marketing platform to launch personalized CRM campaigns. dynamically change casino lobbies and bet slips and create engaging gamified experiences. Learn more at OptiMove.com. For today's episode, I'm joined by Shai Frank. Shai, it is great to have you on the pod today. You've really led product evolution of OptiMove for the past eight years, but where does the platform stand today and how are you positioning OptiMove for the years ahead? Hey, Joe, thanks for having me. Yes. um I've been with OptiMove for almost eight years now and the product has evolved a lot over these years, as well as the industry and the market and technology in general has evolved a lot. And ah this time it's all about AI and AI agents and agentic platforms. And while we've invested a lot in previous years in our data capabilities, in our decisioning capabilities, our channel execution. Our recent investments and our future investments are heavily involved around ah AI agents. The ability for marketers to use technology, AI in particular, but not only, to break ah silos in their process, to be more independent, more agile, have more agency, to do more, to be anything and do everything as we like to say. um So think about how things that used to take like an assembly line or the marketing operations where you had to, every time you wanted to do it, to run a campaign, you had to go to your engineering team to pull lists from databases and you had to uh go to your analysts or BI teams to set up A-B tests and experiments. um And you had to make sure that all of your audiences don't overlap because then the measurement is skewed. And you had to have another an army and analysts to analyze your campaign performance. So now technology helps you do everything on your own. ah So you can use tools to have access to data and insights to understand your customer base. You can have uh systems and AI agents that run experiments at scale with you. um to optimize your journeys and your campaigns and offers and levels of generosity within those offers. And the recent additions to that is all around content. So it was always the last bottleneck, right? When you think about scaling personalization, Optimo allowed you for many years to scale your segmentation with rich data, with no code tools to really understand your customer base and slice and dice and create really thoughtful segments that we already sold years ago. And then we allow you to scale your number of journeys and campaigns and experiences because we built ah a system that manages overlap and resolves conflict. So we can make sure that players are not being overexposed or being cross-fired with conflicting offers. So it allowed our clients to scale. their campaigns and journeys to hundreds, sometimes thousands of campaigns running every week across multiple channels. But there was always this last bottleneck, right? There was always this, ah okay, I can build a thousand segments and I can build a thousand campaigns and experiences, but I don't have enough content variations to hydrate those campaigns and experiences. How am I going to come up with this? And historically, to generate content, you had to have like an agency or a design team on your own that had to run manually with every content permutation. And it used to take a lot of time. And nowadays, this bottleneck is disappearing, right? So content is becoming cheaper. Maybe you can argue it's getting free over time. And then this last bottleneck is removed. Now you can scale content production in ways that you couldn't do before. But that introduces a new challenge. If I now can create instead of two content variations, I create 20 or 50 or 150. How can I make sure that they are all on brand, that they are all compliant, that all the links are working well, that all the images are rendering well, all the offers are really, the terms and conditions match the hero image and the title. That becomes hard to do as a human being. And how can I make sure that every customer gets the right content permutation for them. This is where this new wave of AI decisioning tools that we've been investing into is taking place, right? So now we can have agentic QA processes and we can have AI decisioning that decides which content permutation best matches each customer at scale. So now we have this cycle that you can create more content. You can make sure that it's high quality on brands and matches all of your kind of rules and conditions. And we can have automated decisioning of which content goes to which customer. And as you can gain trust in that, it's like a virtual cycle. Now that you can see it works well, you can scale more content, but you can create more. and that trickles back into if I can create a lot more content, very personalized, very nuanced, content variations for each customer, I can create more nuanced segments and more nuanced journeys and experiences. So I can scale my entire personalization. This last bottleneck that prevented us from really scaling personalization is now gone. And we're building the tools to help marketers really, really scale their CRM and personalization. so they can create more thoughtful segments, create more experiences and journeys that are taking care of every moment in a customer lifecycle that makes sense. And then the system optimizes around that. And that's kind of the future of CRM for us. Baz, yeah, a lot to dissect there in just the first answer. But before I kind of move on to build on it, The timing here is crucial, right? Because we're seeing operator margins squeezed. I mean, I'm in the UK, so operator margins are being squeezed to the absolute maximum. This is a recurring trend uh across big global gambling markets. So the timing here is absolutely crucial, giving operators the ability to scale up and uh in a cost efficient way. Yes, I think, you know, with our experience working with uh gaming and betting operators around the world for so many years, ah a lot of what we're building is looking through the lens of optimizing generosity, for example, right? Because we understand the regulation pressure, we understand the margin pressure, the different geographies and the different jurisdictions. So we know the challenge and we know how the acquisition costs of players is soaring, With paid media and with other acquisition efforts. And we've seen time and again how operators are investing so much into acquiring players only to then reacquire them again a few months later after they churn. And this is how we started with CRM emphasis. Don't acquire your players again and again. Retain them better. That's not new, right? What is new is everything is becoming more extreme. um And like you said, the pressure on margins is growing. So the tools that we're building are tailored to helping you with that. As an example, um our AI offer decisioning agent. is something that you can define. I want to experiment with three, let's say, the same type of offer, let's say a let's get offer, or any other type of offer. You can experiment with a few levels of generosity and then decide which KPI you're optimizing for, which is important, right? Yep. is only good as the data it has and the goal that it optimizes for. So in our case, let's imagine you are doing a cross-sell campaign from sports to casino or the other way around. In that case, you might want to optimize for net revenue, for NGR. You want to optimize for profits. So then the AI agent will not try to send the most aggressive offer to every player. We'll try to do the opposite. We try to send the least aggressive offer that still converts, and that way to protect your margins. On the other hand, if you're doing like a reactivation campaign for recently churned customers, you might not care too much about margins at that point in time because you're trying to protect or save long-term value. And then the same campaign with the same levels of offers optimizing for a different KPI. Maybe now it's optimizing for GGR. ah The results might be very different. It might now try to reactivate customers at all costs. ah So we see how the interaction between the power of AI and the rules and guardrails that are placed by a thoughtful human being can really play together in optimizers. optimize your results based on the strategies that you have in place. If you care about margin at a specific use case, then AI will optimize for that. If you can relax that and optimize for something else, then AI will help you with that. And this is how you can create a strategy around your CRM that optimizes across multiple fronts. It's really interesting. the flexibility is absolutely crucial from what you're saying. I wanted to ask you about generative AI as well and the capabilities of generative AI. We know basically content is pretty much free when it comes to generative AI. um Can you tell us why marketeers who don't take control and don't have ownership of this will have content that actually turns out to be quite costly? Look, think we've all, you know, in our private lives, we've all seen how AI is helping you with creating or proofreading, reading content or creating images and videos, right? We all see it across the board. And it was very tempting to slap on some of these AI capabilities into marketing systems like OptiMove like a year ago or even more than that. challenge was that sometimes generating the content itself is not the most important thing, or it's not the only thing that matters, because it's easy to generate an image. Now, is it useful? Can you actually use it in a campaign? Will you actually put it in front of our customers? That's a bigger question, right? Because sometimes it's just a generic image, and it's not very high quality, or it's not on brand. or it's not saying what you're trying to say, or it doesn't match your brand identity, or it doesn't match the offer and the ah type of promotion that you're trying to make as part of that message. So the challenge is not about the generation of images or text. The challenge is really in making them more than just cool demo wear, making them really useful. And we have been investing a lot into that space, right? So we want to build, let you use AI in ways that don't create damage, right? Because it's very easy. It's very easy to do the wrong thing. We want to free up marketers from the burden of the assembly line. There is an assumption there that a marketer can create, for example, take an image and remove its background and change a different background. or take some sports image and put a different text overlay on it, a different game or different jerseys, whatever it might be. There is an assumption there that a marketer can do that while the design team is happy with the results. That's a big assumption, because up until two years ago, only the design team or an agency could do some things. And they had a huge brand book that they had to follow. and the process to make sure that they're generating something that's acceptable by the business. Now there's a promise that the marketer, CRM marketer can do some of it, not all of it, right? But some of it on their own. But we need to make sure that what they're producing is within the boundaries of what the brand permits. And it makes sense. It follows the rules and it's not breaking any compliance rule, right? Because I can generate an HTML of an email very easily. But am I putting the wrong wording on the terms and conditions of the promo? That could be very costly. We know that, right? So there's a lot of scrutiny that has to go in there before you can slap on some AI generation into your system. And this is what we've been investing a lot with brand guidelines, with content advisors, scores your messages and make sure that they are on brand and they follow your rules. You can define your compliance rules. You can define in this uh territory, I'm allowed to say this, I'm not allowed to say that. Or in this category of products, I'm allowed to say this, I'm not allowed to say that. So now when you can prompt to create a template in OptiMove, it uses those brand guidelines and rules. and make sure that we're producing something that is useful and not creating damage. Still, we're not in a situation where it's a complete autopilot, right? Just the technology is not there just yet. Maybe it will be. But so the interaction between human and AI is what really matters, right? So AI can really scale, can help you scale. But you can only scale when you have good foundations. So once you set the foundations in place, I have my rules, I have my brands, I have my compliance, I have my KPIs that I'm optimizing for, I have the audience, I know what their preferences are. Now within those ah foundations, I can scale my content production. And I have an AI tool that scores and verifies and validates everything that's being generated and surfaces to the human CRM manager, only those specific content variations that require their attention, rather than having them spend days testing every link and every word in terms of conditions across all the different variations that I'm creating, which is obviously not scalable. So this is where we see AI helping you do really improve efficiency, improve customer experiences, and not produce too much risk. ah in relinquishing control in ways that are risky. Yes, it's a really interesting balance. Well, one that you guys are certainly positioned well to get right for sure. And uh we're going to go for a quick break and then we will be back to talk more AI and to look ahead to the future. Welcome back and thanks again for joining us. have really interesting stuff in the first half about AI, about generative AI and uh CRM. Um, in your conference address, you spoke candidly about bottlenecks and also automations, automations from hell. Uh, so very emotive. but, um, yeah, has, has AI made marketing more complex to execute? Well, it could be like any piece of technology. um If you're using it well, it really helps you. If you're not using it well, it might ah just do more harm than good. But I think. when we speak about automations from hell, right? ah We like to use that term because we know for years, everyone in marketing is trying to reach this holy grail of one-to-one personalization. It's nothing new about that. But the old way of doing things was creating rule-based ah systems and journeys. So you would say, this is how my player journey is going to look like. And if this, then that, and if this, then that. And you would create journey splits and all kinds of conditions. And then it worked well ah for the first few use cases. Then you want to add a new use case, a new experience, a new journey. Old tools made you go back to all of your existing journeys and add rules to exclude or suppress players, or else they would get both of these journeys at the same time. And you didn't want that. So you didn't really have any ways around that except for going back to all your audiences and adding segmentation criteria to exclude those people from these other journeys that you just introduced. And you had to go back to all your journeys and add conditions and splits and exit criteria. And over time, those journeys became so complex, which if you take a screenshot of them, it looks like a journey from hell. million splits and nobody can understand what's going on. And the poor CRM manager that built this thing over eight months eventually leaves. And then you hire someone new and have no idea what's going on there. There's no way to troubleshoot and there's no way to scale that. And AI can really help with that. And this is something that has been the optimal bread and butter for years right now. So how do we create journey decisioning? So you don't, you don't. feel the anxiety uh of adding a new experience because we realize that people are anxious, right? I'm you think I have this great idea. I have this creative idea. I want to, I want to target players in a specific situation with this specific message. But then the enthusiasm enthusiasm of, adding a new experience is immediately replaced with anxiety of, wait a second, but w what about my welcome and at risk journeys? What about my cross-sale journeys? What about my weekly promotions? What about my NFL weekend highlights? Will that override that? Will that conflict with that? Oh my God, what do I do? And either you could solve that with more rules, but over time you just couldn't. And it just killed your innovation. You had creative ideas that you cannot execute ah because you were just too bound with your existing systems. And OptiMove and technology in general really helps you with that because you can now let this new wave of AI or even more traditional machine learning models to ah make decisions on your behalf without having you to define all the different rules yourselves. So you can have 17 different journeys that the player may be eligible to more than one of them, but it's fine. Don't worry about it. The system will prioritize. You can override with your prioritization if you have strong opinions about what matters more. ah the system can help you really optimize for whatever KPI that you're optimizing for. So you can relax your constraints and say, it's fine. It's OK. So journeys overlap. The system will find the best one for each customer and make sure that their experience is consistent, that they're optimizing for lifetime value. um And this is where AI can really help you. Yeah, it's a, it really is a crucial tool. Um, and there's, uh, uh, you know, a real belief you must've seen things come and go over eight years in the industry. But, um, I sense a real belief that, uh, you know, AI is this, this kind of game changer is not too strong to a word to say, uh, uh, that, that, that it's being touted as, and yeah, the, evidence is there too. So they're really interested in stuff. Uh, I could, I could talk to you all day about this. Yeah. Um, But as a closing question, I do just kind of want to get a prediction from you. Marketing advancements, 2026 and 2027. Yeah. What are they going to look like? And just, just another one from me too, just uh the world cup coming up. Obviously lots of challenges in terms of engaging players CRM off the back of the tournament. CRM off the start of the tournament too, Like, you know, players sign up at the start of the tournament and then the interest wanes. Yeah. How big a role is kind of AI going to play in this? These are great questions. Like I think, uh, you know, with, with regards to world cup, we see this pattern with, with, with many like big events, right? World cup is obviously once every four years. Uh, but we see a similar pattern with other big events that sometimes are yearly, right? know, uh In the US, we have the NFL season, is short and the Super Bowl is a once in a year event that attracts a lot of new players or existing players. And there are many, many CRM journeys and campaigns and strategies to acquire new players or reactivate players from the past or retain, obviously, or active players. With World Cup is the same, I think. the key and we have developed a few ah playbooks internally and now our services team is working with many of our clients to kind of implement some of our strategies and suggestions of how to segment your existing player base and making sure that you are setting them up for success ah during World Cup, leading to World Cup and exiting from World Cup, as you mentioned, right? To keep your newly acquired or newly engaged players uh active over time so they don't fall off. So we have a few playbooks that we've developed and it's all a question about are you taking advantage of the massive amounts of first party data that you have? Everyone is collecting a lot of data. Are you making good use of it? Are you getting the right insights from it to make sure that you segment well, that you interact with your customers in a thoughtful manner so you don't sound like tone death? ah So there's a lot of emphasis on using your data, your existing player data to understand what's happening, to look at past data, historical data, what happened in previous events like this or previous big events like that. We have a repeated strategy of ah thinking, let's look at the players that we acquired in the last big event. Some of them have stayed with us and some of them have not. What makes the difference? Are there different characteristics? Are there different uh betting patterns that we can look into and say, okay, these are the players that are more likely to stay with us for long time. Can we acquire those and not overspend? We obviously know there's going to be a big spend on acquisition. ah Can we not overspend on players that won't stick with us? ah How can we be more thoughtful about that? So that's with regards to World Cup. More broadly, mentioned, yes, how do we look at the future uh year or two of CRM? And I think there are a few themes around that. First is there is always a look, there is always an attempt to find additional ways of engaging and interacting with your customers. There's only so much you can do with email marketing and mobile push notifications, right? um And people are looking for more avenues of interacting and capturing moments, you know, players' lifecycle to interact with them and get them more, you know, connected to your brand and more engaged with your products. And for example, I think loyalty and gamification is one of these big avenues. uh We have acquired a year ago a small startup ah that is providing these free-to-play mini games that you can embed on your website or on your app. And on top of this startup, we have now built what we call OptiMove Gamify, ah which is an entire gamification and loyalty product that can help you engage with your customers in a non-monetary fashion. So you can create CRM journeys. that in addition or instead of offering bonuses and promotions, you can offer badges or loyalty points or any other secondary uh currency. You can enroll players in missions and tournaments and leader awards. Sometimes some people are more incentivized by getting a badge that they can brag in their public profile as opposed to a $5 bonus bet. Wow. That's really interesting. Yeah. So, so more avenues of engaging, right? So CRM, loyalty, gamification, free to play games. We're always on the lookout of finding more opportunities to engage with our customers. And then as the portfolio grows and the expectation for marketing departments grows, ah and the pressure on margin grows, we're all trying to achieve more with less. And this is where technology comes to help. So the entire motion of agentic platforms, I think, is obviously going to grow. There is some hype around that. And the hype cycle will probably uh even out at some point. But still, there is a huge promise there. ah And we can already see it. ourselves with our own internal tools that we're building in OptiMove, but also with our clients, how they can use their own AI of choice. We already have clients that are completely creating programmatic marketing campaigns with OptiMove capabilities, with our APIs, with the different assets that we provide, and they're AI agents of choice. ah So there are a few examples like that. If we had more time, I could share them, but we probably spend two days. Just talking about these things. agentic workflows, the interaction between AI and humans and how we can elevate marketers from being like campaign order takers and coordinators that they copy from a spreadsheet into creating segments and campaigns and testing all of the different things that don't break. How can we elevate marketers to talk about strategies and talking about managing a team of agents that are working together towards a shared goal with a shared success criteria and guardrails that you can put in place and marketers can become more innovative and more creative and let AI handle all the, you know, all the mundane work of creating more audiences and create and testing all of your images and promos. Yeah, it's really interesting. It really is interesting. And we are in overtime now, but I, I, yeah. So just as a kind of example, that's a bit left field, but, um, I regularly go to watch life football at big stadiums and I see, uh, cameras now are kind of, they fling across the stadium on, on rope. I think who's, who's controlling that. That's a whole different thing to how cameras were a whole different process to how cameras were navigated 15 years ago, let's say. And I think the training playbook and the training guide for, for cameramen. must have just changed so much. And it's exactly the same for marketers, right? The training guide now and the training that you put them through, the thing they have to learn is very different. They have to learn a whole new skillset. For sure. And, you know, for the first time marketers are now able to come up with creative, with copy, with images. Nobody expected them before. Now you kind of expect them to do that to a degree. Right. And we expect everyone to be able to use AI and, uh, and Claude code and codecs and stuff like that. I was never an engineer, right? I'm not a software developer, but I can now write code. Not like a senior engineer yet. Uh, but I can do that within the guardrails that my engineering department sets for me. There are things that certain things that I can do. And we see the same thing with marketing, right? We don't expect marketers to replace designers. That's not going to happen. But the design team will define the sandbox that you can play within. And then you can play with the same things. And you can create the same image with 50 different backgrounds. The designers don't want to do that themselves. It's boring for them. They don't want to do the most creative stuff. So let them focus on that. So I think AI really elevates everyone to focus on the fun part of the work, right? Being more creative, come up with new experiences, with new ideas. and let technology handle all the grunt work. Yeah. I like that. like that. Let technology handle all the grunt work. I like that a lot. And it raises the ceiling on creativity for marketers. Yeah, I like that a lot. really strong, exciting way to end the podcast. yeah, Shay, thanks for today's episode. Made my stepping in on host duty in the absence of Charlie and Fernando a really fun one. So I appreciate that. And yeah, we look forward to catching up soon. and look forward to seeing what the future holds for OptiMove as well. Some exciting times. Thank you, Joe. Thanks for having me.