Sports and sports betting don’t make strange bedfellows. They’re not the odd couple. According to Nielsen, ad sales for online sports betting went from $10.7 million in the first quarter of 2019 to $154 million in the first quarter of 2021. Of that, 80 percent went to local television, and the rest was shared among national online sites, local radio, network TV and outdoor ads.
That’s not all. Many nationally televised sports have incorporated wagering info into their broadcasts.
“When it comes to the betting audience, we know that’s growing as legalization of sports betting expands across the country,” said Scott Clark, ESPN senior coordinating producer, sports betting and fantasy sports for ESPN.
William Hill U.S., known now as Caesars Sports, signed a strategic partnership with CBS to become its official sportsbook, according to TV Technology.
“Through our partnership with William Hill, we provide the over/under and winning percentages for each team in each game,” said Kieren Portley, CBS Sports Digital’s senior vice president of programming and production. “This goes along with the scores and standings, and other data that signals to the fans that we offer the most innovative gambling-centric ticker in the business.”
The impact has been impressive; time engaged per viewer is way up.
“For the content itself, Sportradar works with the majority of sportsbooks, offering our customers pre-game and live odds, as well as player props for each league and game,” said Per von Rosen, Sportradar’s product director of broadcast solutions.
ESPN has a deal with Sportradar to provide odds as part of using sports betting to ratchet up viewership.
“Sports betting content is part of the majority of shows on ESPN, with the amount and type of content varying from show to show,” said ESPN’s Clark.
“Get Up” and “First Take” rely on odds for discussions, and SportsCenter features odds in every show. “The Daily Wager” is all about sports betting prep for a night of games.
“We know that our fans engage with sports through betting,” Clark said.
NBC Sports partnered with sportsbook operator PointsBet last year. The deal provides both sides numerous media platforms as well as marketing opportunities and content.
“Our original ‘NBC Sports Edge BetCast’ presentation focused on basketball,” said Nicolina O’Rorke, senior vice president of NBC Sports Enterprises. “It was in April 2019 on our regional sports network NBC Sports Philadelphia with a 76ers regular-season game, followed by a playoff game.”
In February, NBC Sports and PointsBet broadcast a betting companion show during the Waste Management Phoenix Open PGA TOUR event.
The team created more than 1,000 unique markets for the tournament betting show, which NBC says was four times as many as the next sportsbook for that event.
NBC Sports plans to extend this experience into broadcasts and live streams.
DraftKings bought Vegas Sports Information Network (VSiN) back in March, and a month later signed an agreement to provide content to Dan Le Batard’s Meadowlark Media.
FanDuel has a deal with media personality Pat McAfee to run his talk show—a first in the industry—and in May became the official odds provider for the Associated Press, a deal that includes sharing content.
“Leagues and media companies are seeing an unbelievable opportunity to make a lot of money,” said Bynum Jaeger, an agent at Harlan Sports Management in Chicago. “Money drives everything in business, especially coming out of a pandemic. It was an untapped resource for a long time.”
The expanding legalization of sports betting has hastened agreements, said Adam Kaplan, FanDuel Group’s general manager and vice president of content, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.
“The idea of bringing that business into the regulated market that’s taxed, that creates jobs, there’s tremendous support for that,” said Matt Kalish, president of DraftKings North America. “And then that’s branched into the media company side of things.
Partnerships of various stripes give sportsbooks the opportunity to improve major market share by delivering sports and betting related content of all kinds and to all levels of expertise. The question is whether the growing presence of a sports betting related presence will create a backlash.
DraftKings acquisition of VSiN, while the sportsbook giant sees it to grow their market share, some in the betting community worry about having a small number of brands dominating the scene.
Adi Dhandhania, senior vice president for strategy and interactive at Bally’s Corp., tells CDC Gaming Reports that “consistent and creative offerings are key to enhancing our competitive posture in this market”. For Bally’s it is a stew consisting of the regional sports networks’ partnership with Sinclair, the fantasy of Monkey Knife fight and sports betting platforms.
When it comes to content, “we have the unique ability to integrate and deliver engaging and interactive content that will differentiate our content from other broadcasters,” Dhandhania said.
DraftKings CEO Jason Robins told a panel of investors: “Media is an area we have for a long time believed in (and is) where we acquire (most of) our customers. We can get VSiN to talk more about in-play. It’s become a much bigger area of focus.”
As to the recently announced FanDuel-Associated Press agreement, FanDuel will be the only one quoted by AP journalists when writing about sporting events and betting markets.
“The Associated Press is keeping editorial independence, as part of its deal with FanDuel, and I don’t expect there to be any change in its editorial approach. If there is a controversy involving FanDuel, I expect that AP will cover it objectively,” said David Purdum, gambling writer for ESPN.
In Purdum’s view, the primary function of the deal is that it gives “AP consistency in its stories, in terms of always citing FanDuel odds” but “the one negative, to me, is that odds vary from one sportsbook to the next and using only one sportsbook’s odds may not paint the complete picture of the market.”
