At last month’s SBC Summit Barcelona Digital panel industry experts gathered to look at sponsorship, online sports betting and education in the LatAm betting industry.
In the ‘Understanding and reaching LatAm players’ panelists explored how sponsorship can be used to best reach Latin American audiences with Betcris’ CEO JD Duarte commenting: “In Mexico we sponsor the national team and we’re very proud to do so. We’re sponsoring at a LatAm level Major League Baseball and the National Football League,” said Duarte.
“I believe that it takes a lot of strategy to actually be able to get the return on investment, but that’s not everything we’re after. We’re trying to solidify our position in Latin America as one of the strongest, if not the strongest operator.”
“It’s not a pure digital marketing strategy where you’re looking for return on investment right away and where you can track the results. This is more of a long term effort. It’s already given us a lot of positive feedback from regulators, customers, Media and from other organisations. So that’s one of the other benefits that comes with it.
“I acknowledge the fact that this is tricky with all these sponsorships because not only do you have to make on the deal with the league or the organisation you are sponsoring, but you also have to activate it by letting everyone know that we are the sponsor.”
Alessandro Fried, the CEO of BtoBet explored how European brands can help to assist the market in its digital movement to online: “We try to support operators to move from retail to online because we know that LatAm is still mainly driven by retail. So to move from retail to online… it’s a challenge. It’s a challenge related to payment and a challenge related to marketing the channel in order to make customer acquisition.
“So we found a very interesting company, a large company, called Rappi in LatAm, and they are what we call an online delivery service. So through this app, customers can directly order almost everything from supermarket supplies to a service. They take care of the app, the payment, the delivery, all the processes.
“So what we did, and this is a technical challenge, is to fully integrate our platform inside the Rappi app. This means that the customer for Rappi can go inside the application and in the same way he finds other categories, he can find betting and casino, they can select the operators, for example in Colombia, and inside the Rappi app they can use the money they have in the wallet to bet and play casino games.”
With most regions in LatAm having adopted regulated sports betting and online gaming as a relatively new concept, Duarte commented that: “There’s still a lot of progress we have to make in teaching people and educating people on how these things work. I believe affiliates are going to be key in order to get to where we want to go.”
To see the full panel session click here.
