Sportradar’s ad:s service has been embellished with some interesting new technological innovations to improve efficiency and ease of use. Global Director Advertising Sales Florian Geheeb explains more.

Sportradar used the recent ICE London event to reveal an expanded version of its ad:s digital marketing service. The firm has broadened the platform beyond programmatic display and video advertising to include paid social media, connected TV, digital out-of-home, and native publisher products.

Talking in more depth about the move was Florian Geheeb, Sportradar’s Global Director Advertising Sales, who underlined ad:s’ enhanced capacity to offer operators wider options to more efficiently optimise their digital marketing campaigns to engage, acquire, retain and grow the customer base.

Explaining the rationale behind the changes, Geheeb said: “When we launched ad:s we were focused on creating efficiency for sportsbooks – efficiency in terms of ease of use and efficiency in terms of performance.

“If you look at how sportsbooks spend their money digitally, it basically comes down to four channels. Paid search (Google) paid social (Facebook), paid media and affiliates. We started with media, but it was also clear that if we wanted to expand our value proposition, we needed to provide solutions for those other channels.”

The winning formula, added Geheeb, was always a combination of what he described as “proprietary technology and channel experts”. He continued: “Talking about our recent launch of paid social as a new product – we had the technology in place, but we also needed the expertise for these channels. To address that need, we recruited a team of channel experts including Brendan Tinnelly, the former business lead for Facebook’s Real Money Gaming offering. This combination of technology and expertise, has been a winning formula.”

According to Geheeb, social media is one of the top four channels that sportsbooks use. “There are a lot of agencies out there who provide services around executing paid social campaigns for operators,” he said. “We weren’t looking to be just another agency that does the same things.  We knew we needed to be different and its proprietary technology that differentiates our offering. We have engineered a dynamic social product that allows us to personalise messaging and deliver tailored advertising. 

“This is powered by in-house technology that translates one-off sporting events into persistent product IDs digestible by platforms such as Facebook, which we further enrich with Sportradar’s own data.  This technology puts us head and shoulders above traditional agencies that offer similar services on paid social.”

In terms of what clients can expect from ad:s in its revised format, Geheeb advised: “We stand for efficiency. And efficiency does two things for us. One, is ease of use. We want to make a marketing manager’s life easier in the way they use our platform. The second thing is performance. If you have a mature market with ongoing regulations that make advertising spend more difficult, marketing spend over time gets reduced.  You need to be more efficient in what you are doing – so it all comes down to performance. How inexpensively can you acquire a user? Or how can you determine or optimize advertising spend?

“These are the two main things we are focusing on, and we are doing this specifically for the igaming and sports betting industries. 

As for the remainder of 2022, Geheeb offered a tentative update on the product front, stating: “We’ve started with display, we’ve moved onto social, and we already have plans for a paid search product. It’s too early to be more precise but I guess if we see each other next year at ICE there will be more to announce.”

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Florian Geheeb – Global Director Advertising Sales – Sportradar