The Big Interview: Marathonbet

Following the launch of a co-branded Marathonbet / Manchester United online casino, Marathonbet, CEO, Viktor Hoffmann spoke to sportindustry.biz about the reasons behind the new online destination and the issues for betting companies in a busy football market…

Can you give an overview of the new online casino you launched recently with Manchester United?

We started looking at the prospect of a co-branded live casino at the beginning of the year and wanted to launch it at the start of our second season sponsoring the club.

Our partnership with United gives us access to some incredible assets and an abundance of ways to use them. We identified strategies for differentiating ourselves from our competitors and had always been keen on building a host of co-branded products. The live casino was born from that desire.

The platform presents an easy crossover opportunity for players and the studio element of the casino allows us to immerse customers in a unique Manchester United experience.

But it also goes beyond playing cards and roulette. The co-branded casino creates a vehicle to activate promotions where fans can win money-can’t-buy experiences, match tickets and merchandise.  It allows us to engage with United fans on a completely new level and introduce them to new Marathonbet products.

It’s a project that hasn’t been done before and one we’re very proud of. It also pays testament to the power of how a good brand/sponsor relationship – like the one we share with Manchester United – can bring real value to your business.

We are grateful to the club for their work on the live casino and recognised instantly through their enthusiasm for it that we were working on something really exciting.

Long-term, what are you hoping to get out of the online casino and the partnership?

Live casino is one thing – everyone knows roulette, blackjack and other classic favourites – but I think we can up the ante with more interesting and better content for players.

This might include quizzes and gameshows, where winning is more skill-based, and other features where if you’re a great fan of Manchester United you have a real edge against the house. The evolution of this idea is ever-growing and shows how the co-branded live casino gives us flexibility to roll-out new concepts along the way. We’re confident this is a step in the right direction.

In terms of what we want to get out of it, the brand awareness of being associated with a hugely recognised and respected outfit like Manchester United is paramount. The club has iconic status across the globe and of course the UK – a market where we’re actively looking to grow.

We want new experiences, both for ourselves as a business and for our customers, and they’ll come from developing new ways of activating the assets we have.

There’s lots more we can offer fans and there’s also more we can do to engage players, encourage cross-sale and guide people to Marathonbet’s product portfolio – not just in sports betting.

It’s a very crowded marketplace and Marathonbet has a strong football portfolio, both past and present, do you feel football is a key market for betting companies?

Football is key. In the sports betting industry it doesn’t matter what jurisdiction you’re in or what country you’re operating in, football is a global sport and something the vast majority of our database is interested in. It’s not new. It’s something that has always been part of the matchday experience of going to watch your favourite team and having a punt on what you think will happen. People do that in different ways.

What are the biggest challenges you face with so many companies investing in football and sport?

It’s getting crowded and difficult to get access to deals that will have the most impact – but we pride ourselves on our rich history of sponsorship in the UK. As well as Manchester United, we kicked off our third season with Hibernian earlier this year and we’re also invested in the Spanish market with Malaga in La Liga. Our next step, naturally, is to take those packages, negotiate them hard and get the most out of it – using those assets in new and innovative ways.

In the last couple of years, the focus has shifted to what assets the clubs realise they’ve got. It’s turned more into social databases, the fanbase and how they interact on social media. With that, when fans are excited and passionate, you have to also be careful and have integrity in what you put in front of them. We realise we have a huge responsibility to not just push ourselves into fans’ faces, but add something that wasn’t there before. It has to be a highly regulated process.

In terms of clubs’ assets, do you think there’s been a shift in what they offer sponsors, is there more of an understanding of what can be achieved on that fan engagement side?

Absolutely. Testament to that is how the clubs are working with us and the trusted relationship we have – especially with the clubs’ marketing departments and commercial functions. The truth is there is a sponsor for pretty much anything you can think of, they are all in different industries and overlap in certain areas. There’s a community football clubs of different, leading companies coming in and looking at how they can add value.

For example, in creating video content, we found fanbases engage more when we use our access to the club to portray players in almost reality TV type scenarios. We film them in real-life settings away from the post-match interviews and press conferences, doing things outside football and giving fans a taste of what the players are like. We recently took a few players to a golf tournament and it was amazing to see how they are as human beings, how they interact and joke about and enjoy their time off. It’s something the fans would not usually see because the behind-the-scenes set-up wasn’t there before.

Do you ever compare yourself to your competitors?

Of course we do. It’s a case of market-by-market, we are a global company and we’ve been around for about 20 years. We compare ourselves to any competitor in the market that we enter. In the UK it’s very saturated, there’s a lot of household names and there’s rapid consolidation of the market at this time. It’s difficult because you’re an underdog, fighting to consolidate and to have legacy as a household name. It also creates lots of opportunities to offer things that customers strive for – from great prizes and service to having our own sportsbook platform. We can price up anything we want – and we do. We mark up more markets than anyone else. That gives us an opportunity to be strong where other companies aren’t.

From a personal point of view, you’ve had a lot of experience across the sector in sport, have you seen any major shifts in consumer habits and behaviour in sport?

We’re a technology business and this industry is completely online now. Even though you see a lot of retail shops about, those shops are all about data. It’s the last battlefield now and about making sure if you’re in the shop, you’re online. More than that, it’s mobile. Betting patterns have changed completely over the past ten years or so. People who are betting on winners’ markets are no longer betting before the game on who wins, but during the game, betting on what’s going to happen in the next few minutes whilst watching the action live.

This puts a lot of stress on the technology and operators. To offer something that is changing so rapidly with so much dynamic content, and doing it with integrity and making sure everything is correct and stable, is incredibly complex. For the millennials and your prospective customers, they’re almost alien to desktop. They want very simple, decluttered user interfaces where we have to be at the forefront. It’s just like any e-commerce business. It’s about user experience.