In this episode of "About That", Carl Mayer speaks to Shukmei Wong, Senior Vice President, Omnichannel Media at Involved Media, to discuss online sports betting and why increased exposure does not always guarantee growth.
About Shukmei Wong:
Shukmei is Senior Vice President, Omnichannel Media at Involved Media. She oversees strategic investments across all media channels, including video, digital, audio and OOH. By fusing data analytics with her marketplace insights, Shukmei formulates measurable media campaigns that meet and exceed client objectives. Beyond her extensive background in performance marketing, Shukmei leverages the relationships forged over her career to create unique media partnership solutions for her clients.
Carl Mayer: It seems like you can't turn on the TV, open your phone, get on the computer without seeing some ad for some online gambling site. Which means with all that money being spent, the industry is growing, right? Maybe not.
Shukmei Wong is with us today, SVP, Omnichannel Media at Involved Media, an AMS company. Thank you for being here with us.
Shukmei Wong: Thanks for having me.
CM: There is a lot of money being spent clearly. How much really is being laid out in advertising for this?
SW: I mean, just looking at revenue, we keep seeing record numbers coming out of North America in US last year, we saw gaming revenue hitting almost 79 billion dollars and that's a nine percent growth year over year. So if that pacing continues, then we could be seeing revenue hitting 80 billion this year. And in Canada, Ontario saw revenue of 9.5 billion and that was just from December alone. So obviously the category is growing and there's a huge demand.
CM: A lot of that growth would seem to come from more and more states legalizing gambling or reducing the restrictions on it. There's going to come a point where you hit a wall with that right, where you just you're going to run out of states that can legalize it. Are you starting to see sides of that already?
SW: We are. And you can tell by the rising advertising costs in the category. Early on, every time a state legalized, that's a new pool of audience to reach. We can run awareness play and you get new users in. But now we're starting to move past that phase.
We're seeing more mature markets like New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ontario is stabilizing too. For those markets, growth is less about getting new audience because they've already spent years targeting that same pool of people. So for them, growth is now more about competing harder for that same group of people and that naturally drive cost up.
And when you're looking at advertising, media optimization systems tend to favor the recent banners and the high frequency players and targeting users that might be already down the funnel. When you're looking at certain states, that's not really, you know, driving expansion, that's you're just really throwing more ads at the same group of people.
CM: How can an advertiser of an online gambling site find ways to expand beyond that goal, to get users that aren't being targeted over and over again?
SW: Yeah, I mean, they have to shift the strategies and evolve. Instead of thinking about broad exposure, they have to be more deliberate and think about where are we showing up? How often are we showing up, and are we reaching the right people? Because if you're targeting the same people who already converted, then you're not really reaching, you know, you're not growing.
A good example is for one of our clients, gambling clients, you know, we look at sports because that's such an endemic environment. Everyone is buying sports. But again, everyone is bidding out, trying to out bid each other for that same pool of impression that striking cost up.
So it's really getting harder to really play sports and get the returns from it. But when we start to analyze beyond those CPA metrics because again, performance looked really strong, but when we pull back and say what is our retention rate, you know, what's our churn rate? Is this really growing? You know for our clients, that's when we have to take a step back and go beyond those endemic environments like live sports.
We started looking for entertainments, other values that is driving more female-based gamblers and we saw the returns coming in tenfold. You know, brands have to just pivot their thinking and be more deliberate, and look at incremental, because that is a good way of measuring if you're really reaching new users or you're just recycling the same demand.
CM: It's definitely an exciting, interesting topic. You've written quite a few articles on this. You've done other topics also, but really focused on the online gambling beat lately. Read the stuff she's already written, and read everything she's going to write. She is Shukmei Wong, SVP, Omnichannel Media, at Involved Media an AMS company. Thank you for being here.
SW: Thank you.
CM: And when we're done, we're going to come up, as soon as we're finished here, we're going to put some wagers on what the revenue will be. You'll let me know some Over-unders.
SW: Oh yeah, I got you.
CM: Thank you for being here for About That. See you next time.
Click here to view previous About That episodes.
Read Shukmei Wong's latest online sports betting articlefeatured in Global Gaming Insider.
Posted at MediaVillage through the Thought Leadership self-publishing platform.
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