• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, January 12, 2024

Long before state lotteries and betting apps, gambling was a neighborhood business. There were street corner bookies, the guy who knew the guy at the local grocery store or bar. Gambling was pretty much a local small business. Not now. As gambling goes legit in most states, sportsbooks like FanDuel and DraftKings carpet bomb major media for your bets. 

Tipico is looking for whitespace in all of this clutter by going local back in the neighborhoods, maybe where bookies belong in the first place. In the Ohio market, for instance, it partnered with local teams like the Columbus Crew Soccer Franchise. The idea is to craft much deeper and longer relationships with the team and its fans than the national brands. This hyper local model is designed to tap into fan passions in ways that are up close and community-based, to work with influencers in a region, tap into team rivalries, create more tailored experiences than the big, nationalized betting apps can do. We spoke this week with Tipico’s SVP of Marketing, Brian Becker, who comes to the betting from an unexpected direction – previous marketing gigs at 1800FLOWERS and JPMorgan Chase. You can listen to the entire podcast at this link.

MediaPost: Well, explain the genesis of Tipico, and how the company itself is structured differently. 

Becker: We're the only casino and sportsbook in the US that has been built with proprietary technology completely from scratch.

We aim to put betters’ needs first. You look at that distribution of the types of companies that are out there, FanDuel, DraftKings, they're established, well-known, they try to market to sports fans near and far. We're trying to market sports better. Our product is fast, it's agile, the interface and the experience are thoughtful. We're really trying to leverage the perspectives and knowledge that we gained as well through Europe. So, if you go into Germany, Tipico is the number one sportsbook in Germany. We have a market cap that kind of rivals DraftKings. And so, we tried to take that perspective and adapt it to the US market. That's not easy. The US market is incredibly different. Sports are different. The understanding of betting paradigms and trends is unique. It's new to people here. And so, the genesis of Tipico started in Europe, but over the last three years we've built a sportsbook with a product that we think is incredibly effective in meeting betters’ needs and are really excited to grow that as we kind of expand in the US.

MP: So, tell us about the local angle, though. You're coming into market with Ohio, with particular team relationships. Let's start with that team run fan-based relationships and the kinds of partnerships that you're making here that might be different from other sportsbooks.

Becker: We launched Ohio, went online, essentially, was regulated basically about a year ago. So, January 1st, 2023, and that was new for us, new for us to start on day one of a state launch. We had always been a late entrant into other states, so we were already live in Iowa, New Jersey, and Colorado. So, launching in Ohio as a first entrant was new to us, and so we knew it was really important that we had a hyper local approach. We created a relationship with an entity called the Columbus Crew. So, they're an MLS soccer club located in Columbus. And we thought it would lay a really good foundation for us to continue and grow into 2023.

You have to basically have a partnership like this to get market access. It can be through a land-based casino or a local sports team. The crew helped us and acted as a catalyst for us to hit the ground running, specifically in Columbus. We had to be counter to what we saw from some of the other sportsbook operators there. So, Columbus, Cleveland, and Cincinnati are kind of that third city in Ohio. The population of Columbus is actually bigger than those two other cities, even though they're sometimes more well known, they have more professional sports teams. We just believed in the growth of the MLS as an emerging kind of league, just like Tipico as an emerging entity in kind of the industry and got to observe the local connection between the Columbus crew and its passionate fans.

So, what does Tipico have? We have the exclusive rights to use Columbus Crew IP through various in market creatives -- think out-of-home, designation, integration, customer promotion, social activation, sweepstakes, brand integration throughout Ohio. Because of our smaller scale. We've aimed to develop a specific niche around all the partnerships we pursue. So, MLS as we're talking about here, minor league baseball, local festivals. And the results are clear honestly for us, 400% year on year growth and betting handle for all MLS games. That means betting activity, 2,000 new customers that we that originated through crew specific offers. Our social media engagement grew seven times year on year, and we're really happy that we had to pay out over $100,000 in future bets when the crew won the MLS Cup just a couple of weeks ago. And so, it's been an incredible foundational partnership for us. As a smaller startup, I would say, forget about the betting industry, it was the first of a time for us, and we've really enjoyed that integration that we've had with them, and some of the partners that they work with as well.

MP: Let's talk about your use of influencers, because that's another piece to this is engaging that larger local community. How do you find them? What do you do with them?

Becker: It was consistent season long digital and social media content, largely around sports events, having those influencers on a weekly basis give predictions to their audiences, discount codes to sign up with Tipico. Who are some of the people that have been effective with us? So Cardell Jones is an ex-quarterback of Ohio State. Josh Cribbs, who is I would say a fringe hall of Fame player with the Cleveland Browns. But again, his popularity kind of outshoots maybe even some of his accomplishments largely a kick returner and a punt returner. Kelly Bundy, who has been incredible for us. We did photo shoots with them, their name, and likenesses on our website. It really helped us create a hyper local feel for folks in Ohio. We wanted customers that were in Ohio to come to Tipico and feel like we knew them. And we truly want to give them exclusive access to people that they care about and have relationships with. We've done live appearances with all these folks. We've connected with the fans at tailgates. We've done in stadium activations, in different sports. Like I said, it's not necessarily the bigger sports, because we don't have access there, we're not going to pay as much as some of our competitors. So, it might be the Dayton Dragons, Minor League baseball team, which is another great pocket of Ohio that may be more uncovered than the traditional ones that, if you're approaching these states with somewhat of a template, you're not going to hit. With Tipico, we've tried to be in the places where we think our competitors aren't.

MP: So, in the end, how does this model scale? Since a lot of it that you've described seems like it's very bespoke, feels like it really requires being on the ground a lot of field work. So how have you structured your marketing team so you actually can start moving this model into other cities?

Becker: We definitely have local resources in Ohio. We thought that was really important when we started to make sure that we again knew the customer. So, VIP managers, partnership teams, on the ground agencies that we use. I think the thing that doesn't need to scale is the technology. You need a really good app to service the needs of customers. The performance needs to be quick. Cash needs to be easily dispensed and deposited. And then having a good sense of your customers, how they bet here in the US. I mean, I mentioned the beginning a lot of us as sportsbook operators have some version of heritage from European entities or land-based casinos. And so, the way that people [bet in] the US is different. Live betting is exploding here in the US, especially around sports you wouldn't expect, like baseball and tennis. I guess I would describe them as a little bit slower pace. So, betting kind of adds some version of excitement to them. 

And then I think at the heart of Tipico, we're a data company, so we're actively looking at what people are betting on, how that's different in a state like Ohio versus Colorado. We want to better understand customers. We're out there surveying them and doing interviews, probably more than any other company I've worked at in my career. And so, we really kind of leaned into our VIPs. We often are told I'm a VIP with Tipico, but I'm not eligible to be VIP with some of your bigger competitors. And so, we take a lot of pride in that, trying to be the partner for customers that are heavier betters maybe aren't the level that qualify for some of the bigger companies out there. 

And I would just say, Steve, in summary, we're a challenger brand. I think for anyone working in this industry - you see the growth. You see this incredible machine growing that the kind of competition and the new market entrants. These are huge companies that see that opportunity. And so, when you think about Tipico, we're not that. Like people often never heard of us, and so we have to do all the things, we talked about, great product, intelligent marketing. kind of connected ecosystem to be effective. And I often say internally a lot of those things have to go right for us to be competitive. And so, we're still very small, and most of the states we operate in. But I think we're learning quickly, and we're getting to a point now where the product is at a point where we can really push our foot down and be competitive in those states that we operate in