A G2E Week Sports Betting Thinkpiece | Sports Betting News | LSR Podcast 211
With most of the sports betting industry descending upon Las Vegas for the G2E convention, a slower news week allows the crew to take stock of the state of the industry, as well as a thank you and farewell to podcast founder Dustin Gouker.
Full transcript
Matt Brown (00:09):
Hello and welcome to episode number 211 of the LSR Podcast. My name is Matt Brown, joined each and every week by the brightest minds in all of the gaming industry. With me this week I have Adam Candee. You can find him on the Twitter machine @AdamCandee, two E’s, no Y. It’s absolutely free, so smash the button and follow him over there. If you hate yourself, you can follow me @MattBrownM2. So there are going to be slow weeks as we move forward. There’s been a lot of states that have already legalized sports betting. There are going to be state legislatures that are going to be breaking and all the different things that are going on.
(00:44):
And so when we get these short weeks, Adam, we decided as opposed to just force-feeding some non-news down people’s throats, we will just take general topics and pontificate on those. We will also maybe start to work in additional guests into the podcast as well. Because listen, there are going to be these weeks in which you and I feel like, “Hey, let’s not force an episode where there’s three things that aren’t really that big of a deal,” and we’ll just take a pretty big deal and give more of our opinions on that type of stuff.
Adam Candee (01:14):
A perfect week in fact because many of the newsmakers in the industry are at the G2E convention in Las Vegas. And so rather than making news, they are making connections, and they are talking about the state of the overall gaming industry, not just our little corner of the sports betting and daily fantasy sports worlds. But lots of folks have descended upon Las Vegas, and we’ll give them a little think piece to go along with that.
A Dustin Gouker farewell
Matt Brown (01:41):
Yes. And guys, if you’re a longtime listener of the podcast, Dustin Gouker, obviously as you know, he made the announcement here on the podcast a few months ago that he had been stepping away from Catena Media. He was going to focus on family and personal projects and things like that, and we were lucky enough to have Dustin stick around for as long as he did. We’ll continue to try to work him in as a guest on the podcast whenever we have big topics come up and things like that. But busy guy, lots of stuff going on.
(02:06):
And Adam, it’s going to be me, you, some guests, a rotating crew of other people at the lines and stuff moving forward. But honestly, giant tip of the cap to Dustin. One of the OGs in this industry and a guy that certainly has been around. And as far as knowledge goes, the ins and outs and business aspect and legislature stuff, there’s no guy that knows more than Dustin. So really glad for the run that we had with him here on the podcast.
Adam Candee (02:31):
And certainly don’t mean to eulogize a living man, but at the same time, I think it’s good to give people their flowers when they actually can be there to receive them. And so when we talk about Legal Sports Report, there is no Legal Sports Report without Dustin Gouker. He is foundational to what we still do today. He and Chris Grove were really the backbone of what was built at Legal Sports Report. And I’ve been here five and a half years and we’re trying to both keep the spirit of what Legal Sports Report started as while also growing into a new US sports betting market that changes ever so constantly. And so a big thanks to Dustin.
(03:10):
Dustin is now out there with his own Substack that he’s writing on and talking about his opinions and that gives him the ability to go out there and speak freely on the way that he sees the industry. And I think that’s the best way for you to get his views in news going forward.
Sports betting industry descending upon Las Vegas for G2E
Matt Brown (03:28):
And if you don’t already, I imagine you do, but if you don’t, @DustinGouker over on the Twitter machine. And you can find every time he posts some stuff, he’ll put it on the Twitter and you can find his Substack and all that moving forward. So Adam, we decided for today’s topic, we are moving into an interesting phase in just the sports betting industry in general. We’ve already seen a little bit of consolidation. We assume that there will be more down the line at least with everything, but we wanted to just give our general thoughts on customer acquisition, customer retention, these apps in either their positives or their flaws, what we think that maybe we will see moving forward with all of this. And I’m sure this is a lot of the conversation that’s going on over at G2E, but guess what?
(04:10):
They didn’t ask you and I to be on any of the panels to talk about this, so we’re going to do it here on our podcast. We’re going to do it on our platform here. With that, let’s kick things off with talking about just customer acquisition. We know that at first, it was like, “All these big deposit bonuses.” Which is stuff we’d seen in the past in online gaming, specifically in the online poker realm way back in the day when that all was going down, 20 years ago. That was all it was. It was, “Here’s your deposit bonus. Deposit bonus. Deposit bonus. Deposit bonus.” We saw that in sports betting, we saw it in DFS as well. We saw it in sports betting. That evolved to the bonus bet stuff. Well, actually to the risk-free bet stuff, which is now more the bonus bet stuff-
Adam Candee (04:50):
Hey. Whoa.
Matt Brown (04:50):
I know … which is now the bonus bet things and all that. And I guess my question to you is, as a bettor yourself and as a customer of these sportsbooks, has anything resonated to you? Has something worked better on you than other things? What do you think is going to be the sticking thing moving forward, or do you think it is something that we haven’t even seen yet?
Adam Candee (05:19):
We are talking about acquiring customers when it comes to you and me who begin with a level of understanding of all of this that I think is different than 95% of the people out there. And that’s not to toot our horns for any reason, it’s just a matter of who they’re trying to acquire right now. You’re talking about acquiring parts of the market that have never thought about betting on sports on an app before. And so what’s worked for me I don’t think is necessarily what’s going to work for everybody. Let’s go back to the idea of deposit bonuses.
(05:49):
These major players, DraftKings, FanDuel, MGM, Caesars, in a lot of cases were flush with cash that they went out there and spent or were willing to take themselves into heavy debt for the purpose of the long-term play of acquiring customers and then retaining and developing those customers, and I guess in some cases, getting rid of some of those customers depending on who you talk to. But in the end, you wonder if the assumed position we now give to FanDuel and DraftKings will make the cost of all of those bonuses worth it because we see that FanDuel has already reported a positive quarter, and BetMGM has now, DraftKings has now.
(06:32):
They are moving closer to profitability. Now those came at costs. I mean we’ve seen more profitable bettors be in some cases pushed out of the larger operators. We’ve seen layoffs have to happen at some of the operators in order to get closer to profitability. And we’ve had to see those bonuses come back into some realistic realm because they were never going to stay at $2,000, $3,000 to bring people in. That’s just not a realistic customer acquisition cost when some companies are touting getting down closer to $200 per customer versus even the higher end being four and $500 per customer not all that long ago.
(07:08):
So specific to your question, what works for me? I want a product that works without fail. I want a product that moves quickly, that allows me to see the wagers that I want to see, and part and parcel to that is you have the wagers that I want to see. And then this is really specific, but I want to know that your live betting apparatus is going to function in such a way that if I want to bet live that I can get down without having to worry about delay and rejects, that I can get down without having to worry about the app crashing and all of the things that have been a battle for a number of the apps over the beginning of the first five-plus years of the legal sports betting era.
(07:51):
So I don’t know if it’s the same for you, Matt. I don’t know if that’s necessarily what you’re looking for, being in a market where bonuses are but a rumor. But I know that it’s certainly different than the rest of the country in Nevada, but I know that you have a pulse on what people are looking for because you have friends who are in a lot of new legal sports betting states.
Matt Brown (08:08):
Yeah. And I think that a good separator, like you said in this conversation is the people that are at least familiar with sports betting and the people that are absolutely completely new. Because for me, all that other stuff is all fine and dandy, but it is still secondary to me to the product itself, like you said. So everything you just mentioned. I want a slick app, I want a clean app, I want something that works when I want it to work, I want all the menu, et cetera, et cetera. So yes. To me, a more savvy bettor, that matters more to me than the bonus bet or the deposit bonus or the whatever it may be that they’re throwing at you to get you to commit.
(08:48):
Now, in the case of all of the big books out there, when we’re talking the DraftKings and the FanDuels and the whatever, me having at least a decent idea, and this is when I’m traveling outside of Nevada of course … since I have a decent idea of the functionality of all of those books, it has worked for me in the past, the risk-free bets. I know they’re now just bonus bets or whatever. But when there was the match bonus offers of up to $5,000 on a bet or up to $1,000 on a bet, and I understand that that’s out of a lot of people’s bankrolls, but I’m talking specifically to a more savvy bettor, I do think that those move the needle a little bit.
(09:28):
I mean Adam, if you can put down $1,000 futures bet on a team that you’re like, “You know what? It’s not out of the realm of possibility that team XYZ could be in the mix.” And you’re getting that team at 40-to-1 and you’re able to put down $1,000 on that to where if that bet doesn’t come home, you’re credited with $1,000. You have to use the credit and all that, you can’t withdraw the $1,000 again, but you’re getting that money back in your account. That was a very big draw to me. I made trips to Denver, I made trips to Phoenix, I made trips to take advantage of all of those. So I think for a more savvy bettor, I mean I think that those were actually pretty great to get me in the door. I think for a complete novice, I don’t know if it moves the meter for them as much.
Adam Candee (10:23):
I mean Matt, you’ve talked anecdotally on this podcast about friends that you have in Louisiana and other places where they’re a lot more interested in free bets, they’re a lot more interested in parlays and same-game parlays and $20 lottery tickets than they are about being able to get the best prop menu that they possibly can. And that’s understandable because we see that the advertising for these sportsbooks is the best way that you can read what they think of the market. And you’ve seen it change, and you have to watch the ads subtly. You have to see the little nuances that have changed over time.
(11:05):
At the very beginning of this, it was very clearly about, sometimes the funny thing, sometimes the reliable thing, but it was about trusting the brand or feeling good with the brand. Now you saw it a year or so later, it became certain ads were about payout speeds and things that could differentiate an app. “You’re having trouble getting your money from this app? You’re having trouble with your Bitcoin account in your offshore? Well, maybe you should come here to where we can guarantee you a more reliable payout.” Now watch the ads that you see for all of the big operators during an NFL game. It is almost all about live betting. It is almost all about being able to play same-game parlays. It is all about pushing the higher hold products that are going to continue to ensure profitability in the long term. And again, we can talk about this and we have talked about this to some degree, I’m not going to demonize all of them.
(11:58):
You’re not going to hear me say that this is terrible for the industry, that this is unsustainable in the long-term because I don’t know that it is. That’s an opinion that has changed for me. I used to say, “You can’t have these parlays forever and think that people are going to continue to show up.” And what I’m seeing is that it might be very similar to the mentality of the lottery ticket buyer, of the Powerball player who’s perfectly willing to keep showing up and throwing 20 bucks at Powerball to be able to have a shot at hitting that 50-to-1 same-gamer as opposed to feeling like, “I want to learn how to be better at this so I can hit 52% of my sides.”
Matt Brown (12:33):
It absolutely is the truth. And I think this takes us to the retention side of things with all of this, and I think this is where there is a big differentiator with all this. And I guess going back to the acquisition stuff, one thing we didn’t mention, we don’t have enough case study yet, Adam, in this to find out if the tangible bonus is something that will really resonate with people. Because we just found out as Fanatics has gone live, I was interstate, I sent you the ad when I was down in, I was in Tennessee. And so when I was in Tennessee, it was, “Make your first $50 bet and pick out the jersey of your choice.” And if you’re a casual bettor, that’s a pretty good deal. You make a $50 bet and you can go pick out a jersey of your choice and they’re going to mail it to you, and then you have something that you can tangibly hold.
(13:27):
It’s a physical object to remind you that, “Fanatics gave me this.” That’s at least interesting to me. We don’t have enough sample size yet, and certainly they don’t have enough of reach in the market quite yet for us to know if this is going to be something that does make any penetration in the market. But I think that’s an interesting thing, at least where somebody gets that. It’s not a bonus bet where that can be gone and it’s gone forever and you never even knew it existed because you’ll forget about it in 20 minutes after it’s done. You’ve got a jersey that you might put on the wall or that you might wear. So I don’t know, it’s an interesting thing for me.
Adam Candee (14:07):
And we’re still a little bit talking about acquisition when we have that discussion. Fanatics is a new entry. They’re trying to bring people in and we’ve talked a lot about what we think the value proposition is for Fanatics in that whole ecosystem of jerseys, of trading cards. Of all of the things that are now a lot more popular among people who would be inclined to bet on sports in the first place and could activate a new set of customers who had been a dwindling base of customers from which to draw who had not been activated in the course of five years. But it really brings up an overall larger question about the business case for these sportsbooks because they are operating in a situation where they have very little idea what the total addressable market is going to be in the United States over the next five to 10 years. It might not change that quickly.
(15:00):
Florida, we’ve seen the back and forth that goes on there, and it’s still really just Hard Rock unless someone wants to try to get involved at what would almost certainly be a loss in Florida. Texas, we don’t know. California, we don’t know. New York has already seen its bonuses reduced because of the tax rate. We don’t know what’ll change there. So they’re looking at trying to build out not knowing, “Are we going to have a lot more new customers to bring in or are we going to be trying to retain the ones that we already have?” And now five and a half years in, they’re facing a unique set of challengers if you are at the top. If you are FanDuel and DraftKings and you are the top two in market share, here are the three challengers that you’re facing.
(15:41):
One, you just mentioned it, Fanatics and its very different value proposition. ESPN is going to come in and have the largest brand recognition of anyone doing this anywhere, period. Bigger than MGM, bigger than Caesars. They have the biggest brand recognition of anyone in sports. So that brings the second challenger. And the third challenger is already making its way in the United States and it’s bet365 who comes in with, if not superior products than at least comparable products to what DraftKings and FanDuel are throwing out there, and far more time-tested overseas and with the deepest of deep pockets the same as Fanatics to be able to throw at this and to be able to incur the losses that others might blanch at.
(16:27):
So it really is an interesting part of the timing to look at the big two and really the big four and say, “How are you going to retain your customers in the face of what I think is the last big set of new challenges you’re going to see for a while?”
Matt Brown (16:43):
The retention side of things is very interesting to me because what you do get from an MGM and a Caesars side of things, and this is something where I have actually seen this play out in real life. You and I have had conversations on the side, and I think I’ve mentioned it at least here and there on the podcast, which is I go back to Louisiana, I have buddies who are sitting there and I watch them bet and they basically only pull up Caesars and MGM. And I’m like, “You know the line on DraftKings is X?” I remember specifically there was a golf line that somebody was betting and I was like, “You know at PointsBet it’s X?” And doing all this. They don’t care because they get reward points and they move up in status and they move up in tier, and this is something that Caesars and MGM do offer that the other ones really can’t, and I don’t know why they don’t lean into it more.
(17:36):
I don’t know why it isn’t like, “You’re going to turn that bet into a suite at the Bellagio. You’re going to turn whatever and blah…” I don’t know why that is not leaned into a lot, lot more heavily because when you look at Points-, which I know it’ll change at Points-, but when you look at what PointsBet and FanDuel and DraftKings were able to offer, it was basically just bonus bets. “Here’s a free $10 bet. Use it however the hell you want to.” Or, “Here’s a free $5 bet, whatever. Use it however you want to.” I think for me, the profit boost thing was always more interesting from a retention aspect, but again, I don’t live in these states to really benefit from any of the retention stuff.
(18:15):
But if I’m going to make a bet anyway and you’re like, “You can plug this in and get 30% more on your bet,” that to me is great. If it’s a bet that I feel confident enough about that I’m going to make in the first place and I get paid out 30% more than what I was, that to me, that’s good retention stuff. But I get it, that doesn’t float everybody’s boat, especially if you’re a $10 bettor. If you’re a $20 bettor, you’re getting three more dollars, six more dollars. I get it.
(18:39):
But the tier stuff I do think is fairly interesting and I don’t know why they don’t lean into it more. I know we’re still in the acquisition phase and all that, we haven’t really moved into the hardcore retention phase. But man, the thought of turning your recreational activity into a room on the Las Vegas Strip or at Harrah’s in New Orleans or something and turning that into one of the rooms on Bourbon Street, all that stuff to me seems like something that’s pretty appealing to the casual bettor.
Adam Candee (19:08):
Well, I wonder if you might see a resurgence of it because we did see that pushed very hard from MGM and really from Caesars. I mean, Caesars leaned hard into the rewards angle at the beginning of this. RIP Carl. I feel bad. I miss Carl. Carl was all about his rewards on those Caesars ads at the beginning. And I think that for a product that really had not proven itself yet, and for a Caesars product that ultimately was a little bit behind and needed to revamp, it wasn’t enough to overcome the fact that FanDuel and DraftKings just had a better product and a head start in a lot of places that has been tough for MGM and Caesars to overcome.
(19:48):
But I do think in the long term to what you said, it’s an enormous advantage, and we all do it to some degree. Think about flying on an airline. It might be where I have to take a connection somewhere or I have to pay $50 more for a fare, but I know that I have status on that airline or I’m going to get status on that airline and I’m going to enjoy my experience more. I don’t think it’s any different than any of that. Right now, I have a feeling with the rewards thing with MGM and Caesars in particular, they might take a little bit of a break on that one considering what’s been in the news the last couple of months. That that might be something to circle back around to next year as opposed to this year.
Matt Brown (20:30):
Pretty interesting when it comes to all that. From a product standpoint, Adam, we get the Eilers & Krejcik stuff like you do. I mean, we see the app reviews and we get how they grade the different stuff and all that. The guys that you would think are at the top are typically at the top. There’s a few surprises here and there every now and then where it’s like, “That one got ranked ninth?” And I know you don’t think ninth is … There are 20-some-odd active people across the country even though some of the ones you haven’t heard of. So that’s not bad. I think really from mine and your end, if you look from a product standpoint, the big boys have most of what we’re looking for.
(21:10):
At this point, they’ve gotten the apps mostly working properly. You don’t get the crash stuff quite as much as you used to. You certainly don’t get as big delays as you used to with the live stuff. So there has been a lot of progress with all of that. I do wonder now, and I think that we’ve answered this with some of the stuff that’s been coming out in these press releases, I think the next big thing from a product and innovation standpoint is going to be being able to watch the game live inside the app and bet on the game that you are sitting there watching on your app, and whether you have the NFL RedZone or not.
(21:43):
I mean, that’s the big thing. Is if it’s an out-of-market game and you don’t have RedZone, you can’t watch the game. Well, that changes the calculus a little bit. If you go in and what is, I think it’s a minimum $10 bet at some of these books or whatever it is, but is it worth $10 to put a bet down so that you can watch a game that’s not in your market?
Adam Candee (22:02):
For some of them, it’s as little as $1 in a wager that you can put down to be able to stream. And I think it gets to a bigger question in the entirety of this, which is do we ultimately see this as a single screen experience or do we think that people are so conditioned at this point to having multiple screens that they’ll be willing to just stay with an app that doesn’t have the streaming if it has the betting product that they ultimately want.
(22:28):
Now, I don’t know what the answer to that is in the long term. I think there are multiple questions involved in that. One, are you watching at home or are you out somewhere? And two, what’s the latency issue? There is something implied in the fact that you have a stream inside the app that you are getting as close to real time as is possible on your stream. And we know anecdotally that’s not true, and that’s not to drag any product or any stream or any operator. It’s just the fact of the matter that-
Matt Brown (23:00):
And our wireless over here is slower than everywhere else in the world or whatever. That doesn’t help either.
Adam Candee (23:07):
Right. I mean, I could tell you just doing a radio show from a sportsbook on the weekends, on Sundays, there are times that I’m watching the TV in our little studio and I’m seeing what’s happening in the game five seconds before the screen out in the main sportsbook, and I’m telling the audience to like, “Wait for the reaction. It’s coming.” Because I already know. But I also know that what I’m watching is a solid 10 seconds behind what’s going on in the (data) feed that the sportsbook has.
(23:37):
And so in order for people to trust the in-app streaming, they have to trust that for the purpose of live betting, that they are getting a fair shake. And that’s why we tell people all the time when it comes to live betting, bet on a commercial break, bet at halftime, do not try to bet play-to-play. And I know the Simplebets and the micro betting companies of the world don’t want to hear that, but at the same time, until you solve the latency issue, that’s going to be a real question.
Matt Brown (24:05):
I’m beating a dead horse here because I’ve been screaming this from a mountaintop, but I think from the in-app experience where there really could be an advantage is with golf. And the thing is is there’s natural breaks in golf as it is anyway. You hit a shot, you’re not hitting another shot for a few minutes. It just is the way it works. You are walking to your ball down there, they’re waiting on the group in front of them. All of that is happening. And plus Adam, the other value proposition I think from this, from a golf standpoint is by and large, golf coverage sucks.
(24:37):
So if you can pick a group that you want to follow, and I understand this is a big leap because it would take a lot of coordination between the tour and these sportsbooks and stuff like that, but I mean we’re getting there as it is anyway, and down the line, who knows? But if I could say, “I want to just follow the Rory, Scheffler and Spieth group,” and then all my odds are catered to that group and all of my betting options are catered to that group, it’s a pretty decent value proposition for a sports fan. Because again, golf coverage is just terrible.
(25:17):
And I don’t know how they fix it. I don’t know exactly what they can do. But boy, there is something to lean into I think, from that aspect. Because as you mentioned, the latency issue isn’t really as big of a problem because there’s just a natural break anyway within the sport itself, and the coverage is not as good. It’s not as expansive, and it’s certainly not as catered to me or you or whoever as it is with the other sports as well.
Adam Candee (25:42):
That’s been Matt’s golf betting rant, sponsored by Matt Brown. I get it. It makes a lot of sense. I think it leans into something that we will be talking about maybe not today or tomorrow, but within the next few years. And it’s that there has to be an aspect of marketing here that evolves from marketing the sport to marketing the player or to marketing the racing team or to marketing whatever the case might be that is more specific to what people consume these days, which is something that will, I think, allow people to be more fractional in their watching and be more fractional in their betting. Which to say, they care more about personalities now than they do about the entire sport.
(26:31):
Very few people coming up as sports fans now are invested in the three-hour experience of watching a game. Frankly, you and I aren’t as invested in the three-hour experience of watching a game as we used to be. When we were 21, it was a lot different than it is now because we had that time to throw away. I don’t have that time to throw away now. If a game is blown up and there’s nothing going on, I’m switching over to a different game that might be something that I have to be ready to talk about on another podcast or ready to talk about on another show. I’m not giving you the three hours anymore.
(27:00):
But I do think when we talk about how all of this is marketed, the idea of golf fits into this because you have golfers who have individual personalities, who can be marketed in a different way. And I think you’ll start to see more of this, especially when it comes to star-heavy leagues like the NBA where, again, no one is sitting down to watch a December game between the Pistons and the Thunder. It’s just not happening. But if I’m invested in Cade Cunningham or Chet Holmgren, I might be able to give you 20 minutes of my time.
Matt Brown (27:31):
To put a bow on this episode here, Adam. I love these types whenever we are going to be able to do these moving forward, just picking a topic and going off the cuff with everything. From an advertising standpoint, which goes hand-in-hand with all of this that we’re talking about, I mean we’re talking about acquisition and retention, whatever, this is all coming through ads and marketing and whatnot. I know we were setting up to prepare ourselves for some craziness heading into this NFL season.
(27:58):
Now granted, I’ve only been in other states for two of the five weeks this year. But I mean that’s a lot, I guess. In two of the five weeks that the NFL has been going on, I didn’t see a bigger ad blitz. I mean, I don’t know. Again, maybe I’m numb and maybe it just rolls off of me better than it does to whatever. I know here in Nevada it’s not, but I mean, it is what it is with these guys here. But it’s no different here in the other states that I’ve been in, because I have been to Arizona, I have been to Tennessee, I have been over to Pennsylvania, I didn’t see exponentially more ads. I know we were bracing ourselves like, “Oh boy, here it comes again.” I thought it was about what I’ve seen the last few years.
Adam Candee (28:41):
And we are tracking this at Legal Sports Report in terms of the number of impressions, but I think part of that is because Caesars really did pull back where we’ve seen Caesars step back from more of its national advertising campaign. We still have BetMGM pushing pretty hard right now, as well as DraftKings and FanDuel. And for the most part, the ads have not been, as you and I have talked about, they are not promising you the world anymore. It’s not 2015. They’re not telling you you’re going to get rich.
(29:08):
They are focusing on things, with FanDuel, it has been much more of the experiential thing. That everything they’re pushing is the idea of, “You want to make that game tonight more interesting because you’re not going to have that game for very long.” Very NFL-specific. MGM has been all about the in-game betting experience, and DraftKings has gone back to some of the … I saw the one for David Ortiz about 700 times last night watching baseball of him popping the champagne. They’re going for more of that, “You won your bet. That’s cool. Celebrate your wins.” And none of it promises get rich quick, which I think will help.
(29:52):
Again, to put a bow on it because we can talk about this at length on this subject another time, it’s not necessarily all blue sky out there for this industry. There are definitely regulatory headwinds that the college betting scandals are going to present. There are definitely questions about will there be some scandal bigger than what we’ve seen in the NFL to date? But I also believe that when we look at the future of this industry, there’s more reason right now to believe in the fact that this will survive those headwinds than there is to not.
Matt Brown (30:29):
I mean listen, as two guys that have lived through some very poor decisions in various things that have gone on in this industry with different companies, I’ll admit I thought we would be coming on here going, “What are you doing?” Way more than we have. I mean, we’ve had to do that multiple times. I mean, certainly nobody’s perfect. But I assumed almost once every other episode, we’d come in face-palming, going like, “Dude, I mean seriously?”
(30:59):
And I’m actually pretty proud of the industry so far because I think a lot of, like we said, the responsible gaming stuff I think has been definitely not only talked about and addressed, but I think most of these companies have done pretty well with all that stuff. And the over-the-top ridiculous ads you talked about, I think that that all got talked about, addressed and it’s been dealt with for the most part, by and large with all of this. And so I’ll say this, I’m pretty proud of the industry in general with how things have gone to this point.
Adam Candee (31:29):
I’ll take probably a slightly more measured tone to it and say that I think we haven’t had anything as bad as could be expected, yes. The ones that have been notable, I think you probably can point a lot more towards social media than you can toward anything else for the major mistakes, that the mistakes have largely been made. And I hate to generalize this, I don’t want to make anyone who works in content creation or social media feel badly, but a lot of the issues that have come up have been emblematic of lesser-experienced people who don’t necessarily understand the nuance of the industry, the responsible gaming aspects involved and things that we find objectionable that have had to be dealt with.
Matt Brown (32:12):
Yes. They were hired because they understand how to create engagement online with various platforms, but not necessarily exactly which messages are OK to do that and which messages are not, and that’s what we certainly have seen. But by and large, pretty good on most people’s part out there.
(32:30):
If you’re out at G2E, hope you had fun, hope you learned some stuff. I’ll go ahead and say it. Adam and I will be much more present next year around over there. Look at that, I just volunteered you to be much more present around there next year.
Adam Candee (32:43):
Thanks, buddy.
Matt Brown (32:45):
We’ll get our own booth. Me and you will just sit on a table all day and let people come and scream at us about all the stuff we’ve said all year long.
Adam Candee (32:53):
I love that idea. Let’s do it in person instead of on Twitter.
Matt Brown (33:00):
It’ll be the booth and just behind us, it’ll be, “Come scream at us over something we’ve said over the last 365 days.” And they’ll be like, “There it is.” “Here we are.” We’ll just sit there and let you do it. Again, if you want to follow Adam over the Twitter machine, @AdamCandee, two E’s, no Y. I’m @MattBrownM2. And of course, everything over at legalsportsreport.com. Go in and read the great words that Adam and team are doing over there. Enjoy your G2E week.