What were the company's objectives for this edition of Sigma Europe in Malta?

It was great to attend Sigma Europe this year, joining the industry’s thought leaders and innovators at what is one of the sector's largest and well received conferences. For us, SiGMA is an important event in the calendar because it provides an incredible opportunity for us to meet clients, network and share ideas with our peers.

What novelties did you present at the event and what was the feedback you got from the attendees and visitors to your stand?

The big focus during this year is being ad:s – our data driven digital marketing service. We use the latest artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies to optimize the marketing performance of our sportsbook clients. 

With ad:s we leverage our deep understanding of customer behaviour to target users more precisely, which in return delivers greater conversion rates and lower acquisition costs. 

One area of the business we were particularly excited to showcase at Sigma was our paid social media advertising service, which is one aspect of ad:s, Sportradar’s performance marketing platform. Paid social advertising is one of the latest additions to the ad:s offering. It utilizes our industry[1]specific technology to boost operators’ marketing reach and deliver relevant and personalized messages to customers across the Meta social media platforms of Facebook and Instagram. 

With social media becoming an increasingly important acquisition tool across all industries, we are using our expertise to help our sportsbook clients fully realize the advertising potential of these channels. 

Our proprietary technology provides clients with campaign management, measurement tools and automatically generated advert creative, which optimizes marketing performance in real time.

In your opinion, what do you think it´s required to attract the next generation of gambling players, and what role does your company play in the development of the innovations of the sector in the region?

It is clear that the digital ecosystem cannot be understood without AI. And, realistically, what we’re doing with AI today is going to change in the next few years. 

At Sportradar, AI is embedded into the core of the ORAKO solution. Since the company’s 2022 acquisition of Vaix, the artificial intelligence specialists for the igaming industry, we have integrated the technology extensively across our range of services, and I believe it’s going to transform the user experience, changing how bettors engage with sports betting products in the future.  

Moving forward, operators will personalize their products to meet the interests and preferences of individual customers rather simply include customers in segments. 

With ORAKO, the AI driven player journey starts when the player gets first time to the site or application, and not when the customer registers and logs-in, which helps not only personalizing but in the conversion of those visitors into customers. 

The technology allows us to provide different components with different preferences and filtering capabilities, while also helping us make sure that the product the customer sees is relevant to them. It is how I think the user experience should be. 

The actual interaction between the player and the product should be intimate and to achieve that, AI is allowing us to process much faster and to understand much better in real time what the user is going to do.