Games Magazine Brasil - What is your assessment of Sportradar's performance and growth in 2023 overall? Was it as expected or did it exceed your expectations?
Mateo Lenoble - We continue to be industry leaders and trusted partners because we have developed lasting and valuable relationships with our clients and partners, deepening due to our innovative capabilities. Our world-class content portfolio fuels our existing products and robust recurring revenues. It is also the catalyst for further core revenue growth, product innovation, deeper monetization, and value creation. 2023 was an exciting year at Sportradar, positioning us well and looking forward to the opportunities ahead in the new year.
What are the main goals of Sportradar for 2024 in the Brazilian market? And on a global scale?Sportradar is working hard in Brazil with a strong focus on Managed Trading Services (MTS), Ad:s, and AV. Brazilian football is massive, and for this reason, we seek to deepen our coverage even more, which is going very well by serving some of the major leagues.
The sports betting market has evolved significantly in recent years, and Brazil has enormous potential. With regulation, the industry celebrates this achievement and moves forward to 2024 full of work and growth for everyone. Globally, we expect to continue our growth trajectory by leveraging our enhanced content portfolio, featuring our global rights to the NBA and ATP, and achieving better monetization across our product portfolio while serving the downstream market with value-added products and services.
What do you think were the most influential facts or developments during 2023 for Sportradar?Artificial Intelligence (AI) really stood out this year, with increased adoption of technology across all industries and sectors, while the introduction of generative AI applications like ChatGPT and other services brought technology into the mainstream.
At Sportradar, we are continually evaluating how to leverage new and emerging technologies to solve problems for clients and generate business value. We understand that AI has tremendous potential in all our products and services, but we pay special attention to the development of our Computer Vision capabilities as a way to enhance our products with a greater volume of data and insights.
In your industry, which themes or technological advances do you think will dominate the market in 2024? What will be the future trends?
One of the themes is customer retention, as operators need to optimize the user experience to attract the next generation of bettors. The customer's relationship with data and insights is changing. In today's media-rich landscape, bettors seem less inclined to scroll through match statistics and league tables to find information on which they can place a bet, preferring to engage with real-time analysis, such as the insights delivered by Sportradar's BET Insight tool. This seems to be especially true among the next generation of bettors, those digitally native, mobile-focused individuals, more likely to be under 35, who view this process as too cumbersome.
It's an interesting development. The appetite for data and insights among bettors remains high; we know they engage more deeply with sports data than casual sports fans but desire easy access to relevant content for a game of their interest. The industry is increasingly moving to meet the needs of the next generation of bettors.
Moreover, in today's attention economy, operators are competing with a multitude of brands for the attention of sports fans. Billions of data points are captured in sports every year; it is humanly impossible to go through this volume of data manually and extract everything that will add value to the sports betting experience. This is where AI-driven solutions, like Sportradar's BET Insights, come into play, making it easier for operators to serve bettors useful content.
What is your overall opinion on the regulation of the sports betting and online gaming market in Brazil?
The betting industry is constantly evolving, with changes in regulation creating new challenges and opportunities for operators. As partners to hundreds of operators within the industry, it is important that we are aware of regulatory changes and help our clients interact with their customers in a compliant manner.
Latin America is currently a mix of regulated and unregulated markets. When you regulate the market, and we've had this experience in Argentina and Colombia, local and international brands tend to strengthen and expand the market.
Regarding the region, Brazil is naturally the main market due to the size of the country and population. We have been working hard in Brazil in recent years and, like the entire market, we were eagerly awaiting the regulation of sports betting. Brazil is a dynamic market and will become even larger after regulation. Additionally, football is the most popular sport in Brazil, and with the regulation of sports betting, the demand for football content in the region is likely to increase. Sportradar is well-positioned to meet this demand with a leading portfolio of football products and solutions.
What trends do you see in the gaming industry, and how is Sportradar positioned to capitalize on them in 2024?
I mentioned customer retention and highlighted AI. The digital ecosystem cannot be understood without AI. At Sportradar, artificial intelligence is embedded at the core of the ORAKO solution. Since acquiring Vaix, experts in artificial intelligence for the online gaming industry, in 2022, we have extensively integrated the technology into our range of services, and I believe it will transform the user experience, changing how bettors interact with betting products sports in the future.
In the future, operators will customize their products according to individual customers' interests and preferences, rather than simply placing customers into segments. With ORAKO, the AI-driven player journey begins when the player first accesses the website or app, rather than when the customer registers and logs in, which helps not only with personalization but also converting those visitors into customers.
Technology allows us to provide different components with different preferences and filtering capabilities, while helping us ensure that the product the customer sees is relevant to them. This is how I think user experience should be. The actual interaction between the player and the product must be intimate, and to achieve this, AI allows us to process much faster and understand much better in real time what the user is going to do.
Source: Exclusive GMB
