Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
A daily podcast delving into the biggest stories of the day throughout the sports betting and igaming sector.
Charlie Horner (00:01.368)
Hello and welcome back to iGaming Daily, supported by OptiMove, the creator of positionless marketing and the number one player engagement solution for sports betting and iGaming operators. Today on the show, we're joined by OptiMove and its VP of revenue, Motti Coleman. Motti, thanks for joining us. How are you doing?
Motti Colman (00:20.379)
Pleasure, yeah, I'm thinking it. Thank you.
Charlie Horner (00:22.53)
Very good. And I'm also joined by SBC Media's editor at large, Ted Manomir. Ted, thanks again for joining me. How's things?
Ted Menmuir (00:29.958)
Very well, man. Glad to be on this special podcast with Mutty. And I'll you all the things after. Yeah, it it is. Of course it's special, special guest.
Motti Colman (00:36.61)
special out there.
Charlie Horner (00:42.38)
Yes, special indeed. We're not setting expectations too high for you there, Mottie.
Ted Menmuir (00:47.91)
you
Motti Colman (00:48.912)
I'll cope, this isn't my first rodeo, so let's see how we go.
Charlie Horner (00:51.714)
Yeah. Fantastic. Well, we're here to discuss some of the latest updates from OptiMove, some of the biggest trends driving iGaming in 2026 and of course, the technology that keeps the world spinning AI. Firstly though, Motty, there's been some big news from OptiMove in the last few weeks. So the headline news is OptiMove's acquisition of Smartico. Could you just talk us through the deal and
Motti Colman (01:17.584)
Mm-hmm.
Charlie Horner (01:21.326)
how it came about, really.
Motti Colman (01:23.311)
Yeah, sure. Well, they're a company that we've known for a while. over the last few years, there's clearly a number of different players now in the CRM space. I I've been at Upmove for over 11 years. So probably for the first half of the time that I was there, it was basically only us. But there's a number of very good other vendors that have emerged that each have their own path that they've chosen.
And Smartico really started to emerge probably two to three years ago. They existed before, but really started to emerge and they came to the market really with a gamification first angle. And I've probably said it on your podcast, from a personal perspective, I didn't see it coming because we knew the gamification existed and has done for a very long time, but the market was just very ready for it when they brought it. they also bought a very good product that was intertwined with CRM.
So, you know, they found a niche that the other players in the space didn't really have and everybody's been playing catch up for that specific node, ourselves included. But it's very clear that they've carved themselves out a very nice space in the industry. was actually, whilst we'd spoken to them a few times in the past, maybe 18 months ago or so, actually at SBC in Lisbon last year, myself and Pini.
who's our CEO and founder. We're kind of looking around and, you know, it's very clear that it's becoming a more more crowded space. And just like you've seen in the B2C space and in other parts of the B2B space as well, when the space starts to become a bit crowded and when, when operators can't necessarily...
fully appreciate the difference between vendor one and vendor two. You know, that's the time to start making a move. fortunately, we're in a position having been around for quite a while and, you know, and kind of been the mainstays of this space and have built quite a nice business that we were in a position to actually make a move. And so that's what we did.
Ted Menmuir (03:08.326)
you
Charlie Horner (03:26.734)
And I think one thing to really know about this deal in particular is that Smartico is going to continue to operate as an independent entity. Could you just talk us through that decision and sort of why that's the case and why OptiMove is being essentially a backer of that move?
Motti Colman (03:35.066)
Mm-hmm.
Motti Colman (03:44.707)
Yeah, well, I mean, firstly, if I go back to kind of what I said a moment ago, they'd carved themselves out a very nice niche. And they actually was interesting during the due diligence process. Whilst I'd historically assumed that we compete for the same client effectively, and in some way we do because we both are competing for operators in the CRM, in the gaming industry who looking for a CRM platform. Actually, when I looked at their
client list and kind of compared it to ours, I realized that there's a good smart-code client and there's a good opt-to-move client. And whilst there is definitely some overlap, the overlap was much, much smaller than I assumed going into the process. And so, you we want to make sure that we take advantage of their own story, of their own growth potential, of their own ability to target.
a sector or a section of the market that may be looking for something slightly different to what the good opt-to-move clients are looking for. And in doing so, expand our ability to gain market share across the board. So that's one piece. The second piece is that it's a very founder led business. There's four founders at Smartgo who are all very, very hands-on and really have driven the business exactly the direction that they want to go.
their ability to continue to make decisions autonomously from us is their success factor. So for us to start jumping on top of their heads and making them do A, B or C, it wouldn't make any sense. In regards to, I suppose, the why do it, it's interesting because I came from prior to being in the eye game, the industry.
I'm actually a chartered accountant and then I ran a family office. I used to sit in a lot of these type of meetings myself and people often talk about risk appetite. And the reality is, is that risk appetite is only really dependent upon knowledge, understanding, because everybody has an appetite to make money. So really the question in regards to risk is how well you understand an underlying business, right? And if everybody understood every business in the same way, everybody would have the same risk appetite.
Motti Colman (05:57.668)
essentially, and who better to understand the smart to go business than OptiMove. And we do, we really understand their business and we really understand kind of what they've done and what their growth potential is, maybe a lot more so than a private equity business or a venture capital fund or an investor that doesn't really understand the space, the iGaming industry, the growth potential, where this can all go. And so
from a risk appetite perspective, it's more about the fact that we really understand them. And so can we purchase them at a price that is more befitting our analysis of them? Well, yes, but because we understand the space a lot better than basically anyone because we've done it for so long. we absolutely, we saw an opportunity that others might not have seen and not because others don't assume that they're a very good business because they are, just they might not have understood.
kind of where it could go. And like I said, we were in a position where, yeah, we are a very strong performing business. Ourself, we've for a long time, you know, we're sitting on ammunition that we can use. We had, I suppose that they call it in the industry, in the M &A industry, in the property equity, had dry powder. And we saw an opportunity and we took it.
Ted Menmuir (07:06.063)
Mm-hmm.
you
Charlie Horner (07:13.314)
Yeah, there's definitely natural synergies. Look, Ted, I'll bring you in here because I'm sure you've reported on hundreds, if not thousands of &A deals in your career. So first of all, how do you look at this one? And if you have any follow up questions for Motif, feel free to jump in.
Ted Menmuir (07:30.084)
Okay, so mostly my first kind of protocol with you is that, you you've witnessed firsthand the evolution of OptiMove and you're now kind of at that growth stage where you can approach &A from a certain point, but with confidence. And I want to go back to that actually, like, you know who the vendors are, you've worked with all of them. And when you pick the smarter guy, I mean, what are you trying to tell to market?
Motti Colman (07:48.955)
Mm-hmm.
Motti Colman (08:00.314)
Well, the first thing is, you always need to have a cultural fit with the business that you acquire. Because ultimately you're absorbing people and behaviors into your organization. And whilst culture doesn't limit itself to nationality, the fact that there's a very strong Israeli culture behind both businesses certainly helps.
Ted Menmuir (08:06.565)
Mm-hmm.
Motti Colman (08:25.659)
We understand the way that they operate and think perhaps a little bit better than others may. It's not an exclusive opportunity for us, but from a cultural perspective, we certainly felt like we understood them and they'd understand us and that would make the synergies eventually a lot easier to obtain.
And yes, we've bought other businesses. bought Graphite a number of years ago. We've bought smaller companies along the way. Each one is its own learning curve. Each one has been bigger than the last. Each one has provided us with different opportunities. Each one we've utilized in different ways. Some of them we've just bought the technology, some we bought for the people that were there.
and sunset the actual technology that sat beneath it. So there's different approaches, I think this is our seventh bit of &A activity that we've done. And you learn an enormous amount by doing these things.
Charlie Horner (09:31.48)
No for sure. Alright, well, Motty, Ted, we'll take a short break and we'll come back and we'll perhaps touch on a few other topics.
Charlie Horner (09:43.638)
Welcome back to iGaming Daily, today we're joined by Optimo's VP of Revenue, Motti Coleman. Motti, apart from obviously the Smart Code deal, is obviously headline news over the last couple of weeks, what else is new at Optimo? What is it that is keeping you busy these days?
Motti Colman (10:02.551)
it's, well, it's not new. It's old new, but it's, it's a strange, it's a strange, well, it's AI. Obviously it's AI because it's that, know, that's the answer that everybody gives us a blanket answer to everything these days. If you ask them their name. but the reason that I kind of give a slightly bewildering response to that, I actually think in an interview with you guys at SBC in Lisbon, 18 months ago or so, I said,
Ted Menmuir (10:18.374)
You
Ted Menmuir (10:29.446)
them.
Motti Colman (10:30.595)
You know, I said we were doing AI before it was called. and it was kind of a bit of a, yeah, it was kind of a bit, it was a bit of a throwaway line at the time, but it got picked up quite a bit. And, and, and the reality is, that we were, we were doing AI from the start of the business, but, but AI has taken on many different forms. and how we've attacked that.
Ted Menmuir (10:33.862)
Yeah, that was with me.
Motti Colman (10:57.911)
has been very, very different to most businesses. actually, you know, whilst there are many different vendors in our space, in the CRM space, that are all helping businesses achieve the same outcome, which is personalized campaign management through personalized, sorry, maximizing customer value through personalized campaign management. Our approach is always quite unique, right? Our approach is always based on customer intelligence and was based on predictive modeling. It was based on machine learning. That actually
that was AI, that is AI. And how I've come to understand it, or rather how we talk about it, is to kind of put AI into two, not necessarily separate buckets, because they work alongside each other, but two kind of classifications. And the AI that we are all as the layman using today, and I mean this in our day-to-day life, is in many ways it's AI automation, right? You're using agents to do things on your behalf that you would otherwise be doing yourself, in theory.
but you don't have the time and it can kind of go off and it's running on your behalf and it's giving you answers to questions and it's AI automation. Where OptiMove always was on AI decisioning, okay, which is kind of on the intelligence side of things. And so what do I mean by AI decisioning? The world of personalized campaign management,
kind of spawns off into many different directions in terms of once you start running a campaign, if I'm running one campaign for all of my customers, it's very easy to manage. As soon as I start building up more personalized campaigns, even just on the customer level, and you know, you've got four different campaigns or I as MottiComb, it's my birthday, but I'm also unfortunately a Tottenham fan. Which campaign do I receive today? Do I receive the, you know, we're putting out a special on Tottenham for the weekend. If we win, we'll stay up.
Ted Menmuir (12:30.48)
Yeah.
Motti Colman (12:43.77)
versus it's my birthday, so which one should I receive? As soon as you get down this personalization path, you run into multiple decision points, right? And historically CRM was managed on a decision tree, a very rule-based decision tree. That was the old sort of Salesforce way of doing things of a campaign builder that said, if this, then that, and if not that, then this, and you kind of built a tree like that. But the reality is, is that you get all of these conflicting ideas. And so,
What OptiMove brought to market a very long time ago was something that we called smart orchestration. And smart orchestration actually became something that we became kind of famous for, say famous, but well known for. when Gartner talked about businesses across the world that deal with the idea of smart orchestration, kind of OptiMove became, know, even outside of gaming as well, I'm talking. Smart orchestration is effectively eye decisioning. We just didn't really coin it in that kind of way. And actually,
I think because we were first to market on so many different things, of the problems that we've always had is on naming conventions. We never knew what is OptiMove. It wasn't a CRM platform and it isn't an orchestration hub and it isn't a predictive modeling company and it isn't a CDP, a customer data platform, but it's kind of something on all of those things. So smart orchestration is AI decisioning. We just sort of didn't call it that, even to the point where I used to...
You know, the pre-chat GPT days, I would advise my sales team to move away from talking about AI simply because then it sounded very buzzy and it didn't really sound like we were explaining anything. I would rather they actually explain what it is that we're doing and how it is that we're going about doing it. first thing is, that we replaced our naming conventions in the organization so that it's very clear which pieces are AI and which pieces aren't. And that's both helpful to us.
internally and also helpful to our clients and investors in the market and whatever. They understand now what AI pieces we're doing. from a general answer to your question, we've always done smart orchestration, which is AI decisioning. Now we talk about the new elements to that, and it was important to set that out to understand the baseline for all of that. And that's when you start adding in layers of AI automation and more layers of AI decisioning.
Motti Colman (15:08.582)
I'm rambling, but if it's okay, I'll continue to do so. So it used to be the case that whenever I would have a conversation with operators about personalization, the real question that everybody was, well, that you were looking to solve was how can I build the groups of customers, right? How can I automate the group of customers and make sure I'm finding the right group of customers? And...
Charlie Horner (15:11.768)
Sure, sure.
Motti Colman (15:36.462)
OptiMove as a platform was always able from a customer intelligence perspective to help our clients identify who their best performing group of customers were and how to find the correlations between behavior and value. But I would always say to people the bottleneck on a personalization strategy is content. Because I can find myself a thousand customer groups and ultimately, if you went all the way to the end, the true personalization is on the individual customer.
Ted Menmuir (15:59.02)
Okay.
Motti Colman (16:03.481)
Right? Cause we are all different to each other in some way, shape or form. What Optimo have always said was at some point there stops being a significant, statistically significant difference between the differences in the customers. So you might as well group them together at the micro segment level. Sorry Ted, on.
Ted Menmuir (16:03.514)
Fuck.
Ted Menmuir (16:14.842)
Buh.
Let's jump in. We were talking about sophisticated applications, whether they use AI or not. I've actually had this conversation with Penny, to a certain extent, isn't marketing meant to be hard? Isn't it meant to become the secret source that...
Motti Colman (16:21.144)
Sure.
Ted Menmuir (16:40.036)
you know, why I choose brand A over brand B. Especially in an industry where, you know, we're talking about odds on a Saturday night, you know, football times, who's more optimised? So you could give them that, but at the same time, do you worry about how often movies just try, you know, I know that you're all in one solution, but you can't be the panacea for everything. At one point, there has to be kind of a human engagement in there.
Motti Colman (16:43.929)
Yeah.
Motti Colman (16:48.281)
Yes.
Motti Colman (16:51.865)
Yes.
Motti Colman (17:04.708)
Agreed.
100 % right. And again, this goes back to the whole idea around AI automation and AI decisioning. So when it comes to content management from an AI perspective, yes, the whole notion of personalization has created a world where we require far more content. And to be able to build that content utilizing AI, which
we now do an enormous amount of in OptiMove and these are kind of the new things that are released. Utilizing AI to produce that content can be done to massively reduce the impact on the scalability. So you can get to all that level of content. But actually your point there is around brand voice, really. I mean, if I was to condense, hope into a salient point there, which is that each individual brand must tell its own story. It must have, and it's not just colors, it's...
Ted Menmuir (17:50.95)
No, I agree, agree.
Ted Menmuir (17:57.382)
you
Motti Colman (17:58.78)
It's the way that it talks about its brand. It's the way that it talks to its customers. And that's a very, very key part. So one of the areas actually that's built inside of the content creation, the AI content creation that we have, one very, very cool element of it is teaching the AI what your brand voice is. And that's where you start going down the path of a unique approach on a per operator basis. listen, we see it, I mean, forget AI, forget OptiMove, let's just talk about the industry.
Paddy Power always did it unbelievably well in terms of a brand voice that was a differentiator. Today, I think that Midnight do it unbelievably well from a differentiator perspective. I think that Mr. Q do it very well. Those are the three probably that still in my mind stand out as having a very, very different brand voice that uniquely sets them apart. Other brands may try and do that. Maybe Play Joe did it as well. I don't know. But yes, I think without a unique brand voice, everything...
becomes the same thing and it's boring and a bit rubbish. the way that the AI automation inside of Octomove is built is that you can actually teach it and talk to it about your brand voice.
Charlie Horner (19:11.95)
Let's try and place this within some context because I think that's always helpful for listeners. We've obviously got the World Cup coming up and I'd imagine that's going to be a huge stress test for operators, but also for OptiMove. How are you going to deploy that sort of AI solution to power these CRM marketing campaigns during what is going to be an extremely busy period?
Motti Colman (19:39.686)
Well, look, it's a really good question because traditional CRM and still the vast majority of what one's doing is traditional CRM. And when I talk about that, I'm talking about scheduled campaigns, right? And traditional CRM, everybody today already in mid April and probably already for the last month is already setting out their strategy for what the World Cup will look like. And there's always been enormous...
There's always been an enormous amount of discussion. In fact, I gave a talk at Betting on Football, the one that was in Stamford Bridge many, many years ago about way back, way back. So in the buildup to the 2018 World Cup about how you use behavioral insights as a way of driving your CRM strategy from a scheduled campaign basis. And that is important, but that takes you up until, you know, match one.
Ted Menmuir (20:13.284)
Way back.
Motti Colman (20:33.273)
Right. And actually where, where it gets really interesting, the great thing about a world cup is rather than the grand national is, effectively as real time or if it's not real time, IE during an in-play market, but during that one month of the world cup, a lot of things are constantly changing all the time. So you can build out all of your CRM strategy that builds a framework for you. then within that you need the ideation to execution must be minimal.
Right? Your ability to see things that are changing within the World Cup on the fly and then to reposition your CRM as a result of it is critical. So England go out the World Cup. How do you then reposition your customers towards the next best thing that they should be betting on rather than just losing all the customers that you've acquired? Whatever it might be, there's a lot of things that are happening.
you know, in real time, in as close to real time. And so again, if we go back to this idea of AI and scalability, ultimately what it does from, let's break it down, AI decisioning or AI automation. One of the things that AI automation allows you to do is to reach the scale of personalization.
in a very, very short period of time. So you can duplicate existing templates that already exist, but then you can just tweak slightly the different content blocks that exist inside it across multiple channels, across multiple different customer groups, across multiple different offers. You suddenly decide you're going to release a new offer based on the profitability of the group stages or whatever it might be. So you want to be in a position where you can adjust.
your marketing strategy. And when I say marketing, I'm talking from a CRM standpoint. So you can adjust your CRM strategy in as close to real time as possible at scale. And that is what ultimately what AI from an automation perspective is allowing operators to achieve.
Charlie Horner (22:24.75)
Will Ted, I know that this is a big thing for you this year is looking at the World Cup and how big that is from an operator point of view in terms of, you know, this is going to be huge on the trading side of things and being profitable and things like that. I guess solutions like this is going to be really important because it is such a crucial time of the year. How do you reflect on that?
Ted Menmuir (22:38.853)
Yeah.
Ted Menmuir (22:48.036)
Well, look, my kind of question, my final question from kind of mostly from my perspective is...
It's been a very transitional six months since the autumn statements came in and not just in the UK but across every market those margins are thinning. And as you know, that pressure, first port of a call, it always goes to your marketing campaigns as the first revisions. So I want to leave this with you. Please just tell our audiences why it's now more than ever, it's so important to think differently.
Motti Colman (23:08.539)
Mm-hmm.
Ted Menmuir (23:25.992)
in marketing and also of not just marketing but marketing intelligence itself. How to build up real effective campaigns and why they actually do make a difference at this point.
Motti Colman (23:35.536)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Motti Colman (23:42.204)
If I had to summarize it, it would be efficiency or efficiency as a protection against wastage. So both efficiency from time spent doing something and efficiency in terms of, well, I mean, let's just take one very good example, bonus cost optimization, right? So bonus cost optimization itself from a margin perspective is massive. Can you achieve the same outcome from a revenue standpoint?
Ted Menmuir (23:49.037)
Yeah.
Ted Menmuir (24:00.038)
Yes.
Motti Colman (24:11.599)
without bonusing 20 % of your players that would have made the same bet deposit or whatever anyway.
Right? That's an immediate, an immediate understanding and kind of, again, like the whole world that we've always operated inside in terms of customer intelligence, in terms of incrementality, when we look at campaign performance has always been based on the notion that we understand that people are going to do things regardless of whether you talk to them or don't talk to them. So an understanding of what the baseline behavior is versus an uplift and, and, and why are you giving, why are you giving bonus offers to, again, to a 20 % of your customer base that don't require it?
not that they don't want it, they'll happily take it, but that's the point. Why are you giving it to them if they're going to behave the same way anyway? Ultimately, marketing, CRM marketing is designed as a way to
impact behavior. So understanding what those behaviors could be and understanding what you want to do about it is a, you know, that's ultimately the way to drive it. And, and it remains the same equation that the cost of acquisition is significantly higher than the cost of retaining that same customer. That's never been more, why is the CRM space blown up? Why do I have six competitors in this space today? When I, when I only have one six, seven years ago, it's because
Ted Menmuir (25:01.87)
Mm-hmm.
Ted Menmuir (25:27.502)
Mm-hmm.
Motti Colman (25:29.115)
Online gambling businesses are being squeezed from a margin perspective every day and understand that their ability to retain customers is the ultimate way that's going to drive profitability for the business, not acquiring new customers, which is what the industry looked like 20 years ago. 10 years ago when Optimove came to be, everybody understood that it was a great piece of technology and it was really interesting, but there wasn't the set. I how many businesses in 2012, I I worked at William Hill from 2012 to 2014.
Ted Menmuir (25:53.862)
if
Motti Colman (25:58.363)
William Hill aren't the business today that they were in 2012 to 2014. Clearly, that's clear for everybody to see. A lot of businesses in those days were making a lot of money without necessarily needing to be very efficient. Today, that can't occur. So, yes, that.
Ted Menmuir (26:11.415)
Yeah.
Charlie Horner (26:14.944)
Yeah, a really important note to leave it on, think, there, Motti. I think it's essential that we take that into consideration. But look, Motti, really appreciate your time. Thank you very much for joining us today. Ted, thanks as always. Really appreciate your insights. Thanks to Optimove as always for supporting the show. And thank you to our audience for tuning into today's episode of iGaming Daily. And come back tomorrow to keep up to date with all the latest global gambling news.
Motti Colman (26:27.205)
Pleasure.