UP442 Gamification, Fantasy And Sport's Relationship With The Scroll

The conversation dissects sport’s relationship with the phone, how that differs depending on the nature of our fandom, and the specific roles played by mobile games and fantasy league products in attracting, building and retaining fans. 

Finn Bradshaw, head of digital at ICC, the global governing body for cricket, and held similar roles at Tennis Australia, Cricket Australia and News Corp. 

Siddharth Raman, Chief Executive Officer of Sportz Interactive, one of the biggest companies in the world when it comes to fan engagement, gaming and gamification, working with organisations from UEFA, IOC and BCCI through to many of the IPL franchises and media and gaming companies such as Star Sports and Dream11.   

The conversation dissects sport’s relationship with the phone, how that differs depending on the nature of our fandom, and the specific roles played by mobile games and fantasy league products in attracting, building and retaining fans. 

Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
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Transcript

Finn Bradshaw, ICC: 0:00

the great question for any rights holder like us is when you're putting content on social media, is it just another thing that glances past someone when they're watching in amongst amongst the funny dog videos and the, the other content, or is it something that triggers an emotional reaction to the content? that is greater than that, because that's where sports power always is, you know, it delivers emotional reaction more frequently and to greater volumes than any other form of entertainment can do. Can you make that come through the TikTok screen? Can you make that come through? Because if you don't, then you're just competing against all the other content creators out there now. And there is millions of them and they're really good. And so, it needs to come back to the sport because the sport provides that emotion that no one else can do. But that is a massive challenge for all of us.

0:59

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Unofficial Partner, the sports business podcast. I'm Richard Gillis. That was Finn Bradshaw, who is head of digital at the ICC, the global governing body for cricket. Summing up our conversation today, which is Sports relationship with the phone, how it differs depending on the nature of our fandom. And the specific role is played by mobile games and fantasy league products in attracting building and retaining fans. Finn is head of digital at the ICC, the global governing body for cricket who held similar roles at tennis, Australia, cricket, Australia, and news Corp. He's joined by Siddharth Raman. A man, chief executive officer of sports interactive, one of the biggest companies in the world when it comes to fan engagement, gaming, and game-ification working with organizations from UAA for IOC and BCCI. Through to many of the IPL franchises and media and gaming companies such such as star sports and dream 11. Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the sports business. And there's a newsletter that is read by tens of thousands of people across the business of sport. If you want to, receive that every Thursday morning in your inbox. Go to Unofficial Partner dot com and sign up there.

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 2:12

Right. Okay. We just need a sort of way in and it might just be as easy as to ask both of you explain what your day job is. and We're talking about gaming and gamification and fantasy and we'll get all of that in. Sid, let's start with you. Just frame The company, but also your job. What's the role? Give us a bit of backstory, because I think that will help us work out where we then jump off.

Siddharth Raman, Sportz Interactive: 2:36

So, I'm Siddharth, CEO at Sports Interactive. Sports Interactive has been in the business of sports fan engagement for more than two decades now. We started off primarily in a sports data company, but then as sports fan engagement evolved with the times with internet penetration and the evolution of technologies. We've also evolved as a company to bolt on technology and content services to our offerings. We work on behalf of our customers, delivering fan engagement solutions for their fans. Whether it's live scoring, whether it's building out websites, apps, whether it's delivering game, fantasy games, gaming and gamification, which I know we're going to talk about a little bit today or whether it's content services for their own. Assets, or whether it's for social media we help sports organizations acquire, retain, and commercialize sports fans through, through all of these services. my day job entails ensuring that we have the right people in the right places in our off to be able to do what's best for our customers and ensure we are delivering best in class fan engagement experiences for some of the biggest names in the world and in India.

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 3:41

Okay, right. Same question to you, Finn.

Finn Bradshaw, ICC: 3:43

So I'm head of digital at the International Cricket Council. Anyone who has digital or technology in their title, generally their role in the company is to work out how does technology do one of two things or ideally both. how does it help how does it help efficiency. In in sports, there is some stuff to be done around efficiency, but, um, the gains there tend to be relatively marginal compared to what you can do for an organization through growth. And so really what I do Each day, what my team does each day is work out, you know, how can we grow the audience for sport, for cricket? And and a lot of that means how do we keep cricket relevant to people? That means, you know, how can they find it easily? How is it still part of their lives? And a really big part of that is how does it remain part of younger generations lives? Yeah, in this well remarked upon sort of world where everything is fragmented and there's a million different options for entertainment. How does Cricket remain relevant in that space? That's really, that's the most important stuff we do for the organization.

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 4:58

Okay, let's keep the cricket because it gives us a context, because it's obviously relevant. And Sid, what's there's a Strong cricket element to Sports Interactive. I know there's lots of other stuff as well, but give us a bit of the cricket context.

Siddharth Raman, Sportz Interactive: 5:10

Yeah. Uh, Well being. Based in India and being, you know, growing out of India, obviously cricket plays a key part in a lot of things that we do as context. We work with multiple different IPL franchises. We work with the BCC. I work with the ICC as well on multiple other broadcasters in the cricket space, and that ranges from being able to tell the best narrative for a match backed by data. To being able to deliver you know, best in class second screen experiences or complimentary viewing experiences from an interactivity perspective and being able to churn out the right kind of content at the right time in the most timely manner and something that's topical that Keeps fans engaged during the live match and also you know, in between matches having enough across these three areas again to ensure that fans appetite for entertainment and consumption is satiated to, to Finn's earlier point is how do you ensure you always have you know, share of attention of your fans. And that's what we try and do for all our customers in the cricket space which, like I said, based on the kind of customers that we work with is fun and exciting.

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 6:16

So we've got this, this question, and it's the big question, I think it's this, it's the phone, our relationship to it. And I quite often frame this I'm going to use cricket as you know, when everything's a scroll, what is cricket is the question, I think, in terms of we've got an audience and it could be generational, although I don't, it's certainly not only generational, because I'm addicted to this thing as much as my daughter is, so we've got that context, and then along comes sport, and we'll use cricket as the obvious starting point here, is that, okay, well, what do we think now, what's our relationship to this iPhone. How do we answer the questions that Finn laid out there in terms of relevance? it comes to this thing, because I'm thinking there's one way into this might be there's the game itself, and cricket is obviously it's, it can be five days, but let's talk about two hours of live and IPL, you know, a 2020 game. What's our relationship to it? How do we go about thinking about the phone and yours? So Finn, in terms of when it gets to that question, Where are you on that? how has it

Finn Bradshaw, ICC: 7:29

So, I mean, I think technology has been an amazing boon for Cricket because, Because even our short games are three and a half. The women tend to be a bit quicker than the men, but you know, three hours for

Siddharth Raman, Sportz Interactive: 7:40

a

Finn Bradshaw, ICC: 7:40

T20. And, you know, it's just a fact of life that there's not that many entertainment forms that hold people for three hours and so our ability to make sure that people who are already fans can stay in touch the game is unparalleled thanks to the phone, you know, they don't have to Go and sit in the car. At the dinner party, they can just sneakily look under the table. So that's great. The big challenge for all sport and all entertainment properties has been how well social media companies have taken to that device. they've been so good at making, consumption of social media so addictive. That it's eaten into all entertainment forms. And the great question for any rights holder like us is when you're putting content on social media, is it just another thing that glances past someone when they're watching in amongst amongst the funny dog videos and the, the other content, or is it something that triggers an emotional reaction to the content? that is greater than that, because that's where sports power always is, you know, it delivers emotional reaction more frequently and to greater volumes than any other form of entertainment can do. Can you make that come through the TikTok screen? Can you make that come through? Because if you don't, then you're just competing against all the other content creators out there now. And there is millions of them and they're really good. And so, you know, it needs to come back to the sport because the sport provides that emotion that no one else can do. But that is a massive challenge for all of us.

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 9:26

And the, I guess the question there then is my TikTok feed, as you can imagine, is full of cricket and golf and football, but it's a reduction of the sport. It's to the, you know, it's sixes, it's controversial moments. It's a sort of greatest hits medley. And that's fine. It's exciting. And you know, you just, you watch it and scroll through, you share it. Is there anything else? So you've got the game itself, which we can talk about in terms of how that what it means to my, in terms of my relationship to the game, Sid, is there anything else going on there that can keep people. Sort of attached or in some way infuse them. Is it all via the social media scroll or what? What else can is

Siddharth Raman, Sportz Interactive: 10:10

Yeah, I think that's a question we, you know, get from a lot of our customers and our answers. It's never an either or, right? It's this and that. You can't, you need to be where the fans are, but at the same time you need to future proof your organization as well. Three years ago, if we spoke to any large sports organization, they would be thinking like content creators and they still do. But I think everyone's realized that the next stage of the evolution is to start thinking like platforms. Compliment your content, create a mindset by thinking like a platform, i. e. your owned assets, like your website, app, or any other interactive elements that you have how do you you know, deliver the experiences for fans or the right kind of experiences for fans that make them want to come back for more and get at the start of the journey, like, and I don't think anybody's going to fool themselves by saying they're going to take on big tech. But there's an opportunity for a lot of sports organizations and we're seeing this in cricket, not just in cricket, but in multiple other sports where there is this complementing a creator's mindset by also making the right kind of investments in technology to start thinking and operating like a platform.

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 11:14

What would that mean for the ICC

Finn Bradshaw, ICC: 11:16

So it's really about how do you make your your app, it's to bring it to something tangible. How do you make your app part of people's daily habit? And because that's what all the platforms are constantly, all the metrics we all measure on that stuff are, you know, daily active users, you know, um, you know, session time, things like that. So it's about how do you increase those things? And it's, if you're relying solely on. on video content to do that, then you're in a Battle against, all the other video content creators in the world. So what we do try and do is create products, um, that give people, a reason to come back, but also grow their interest in the outcomes of games or what's happening in a game. And to sort of bring that to life a little bit, I guess. You know, I've been in this, um, now 10 year battle with my children to get them interested in cricket. And. hasn't been that successful until recently, thanks to my role, they got to meet some of the Australian players before the women's, um, the Australian women's team played the Indian women's team in the recent T20 World Cup. So they met a couple of players that really engaged with what they were doing. They go up into the stands and even though it's the fast paced form of the game, their attention drifts a bit. I give them the phone, then on the phone they can do things like select their player of the match, predict who's going to score most runs in the next five overs, that sort of stuff that keeps people sort of, you know, somewhat engaged with what's actually happening on the field. All of a sudden my kids cared about what their players were doing. Wake up the next morning, they said, Dad, who was the player of the match? And at least it's starting to edge them, through that sort of gamification that they're really used to on the kind of mobile games they play in other areas, the other digital products they use. Through that, they're starting to care about what happens in the game of cricket. Now, they're a little while away from seeing down to a five day test match and really admiring the out swing work of Jasper Bumrah, but but without that digital intermediary. I think I would have had a lot harder time holding their interest at the game.

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 13:36

said there's a sort of I'm interested in what we know works because that we're looking there. They got the funnel as the metric there. And you've got, you know, it's almost a great case though. You've got Finn's kids who are sort of him. at the top of the funnel still and we're trying to migrate them down and I don't you know there's a couple of questions how you do that what do we know works in terms of this you know and gamification and gaming and we'll talk about fantasy later but all these things are sort of big big words now. But actually it could be that they mean a lot of different things and I get it wrong all the time and I don't know what, you know, so just let's put some detail on what that looks like and the sorts of things that can be done in this scenario. So sort of move people towards or further into the sort of cricket world.

Siddharth Raman, Sportz Interactive: 14:25

So when you look at the fan funnel, I think you can break it down into, into three buckets as the flirts, the fans, and the fanatics. Right? Finn's kids would probably start with the flirts uh, very lucky flirts and that to be able to meet uh, superstars. But the, the, the fact that once they. These cricketers, the interest in the game picked up and then they started interacting with the phone, which is a normal habit for anyone of that age today, where even if it's a fast paced live match that they're at, and we're guilty of this, we also pick up our phones and see and look for something to keep ourselves occupied. They took the first step from, you know, going from a flirt to being a fan. And hopefully over the next, call it five to six years you know, that journey from the fan to fanatic happens. So if you take the fan journey from flirt to fan to fanatic, I think that's a great mapping to also what you know, we are talking about today, which is for the flirts, you get them in with gaming. You keep them on your you move them down further to a fan with gamification, and then fantasy is where the fanatics actually kick in, right? So there, this is a glossary that we always try and also try and educate a lot of our customers with because gaming, gamification, fantasy are all loosely thrown around. But I think it's important to call out that the difference between all of them, right? Gaming is where it's very low touch. Low cognitive load, very easy to play. You don't have to be a hardcore fan. It's, you know, it's something as simple as a click of a button, like very low friction. Gamification is where you're incentivized to do multiple different activities where you're gamifying the entire experience on, on your own app uh, where you get points for You know, reading an article, watching a video, playing a game on a regular basis, something as simple as logging into the app five, six, seven days a week. And then finally, fantasy is something that we are all familiar with. And again, that has multiple variants within it at itself. That is daily, classic, draft and so on. That funnel of flirt to fan to fanatic and gaming to gamification to fantasy is probably the best Is the simplest way at this point in time to map?

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 16:27

It's really, it's a really good framing and it's one I've not heard. And I've heard a lot of these frames, you know, a lot of funnel, conversations you have when you've got a sport business podcast, you see, it comes up a lot and I've not heard that. there's two, two questions then, little builds on that is one, do we know anything about the proportions of movement down from, you know, from the flirts down to the, through the phases, how, what sort of percentage drop off we might be looking at? And the other, there's a sort of add on question, which is, is it a linear? Or do we know anything about that journey?

Finn Bradshaw, ICC: 16:58

It depends a bit territory to territory, and with cricket we're really blessed with huge numbers. The way we tend to look at, if we were to break it down broadly into the three areas Sid was talking about, you know, we would measure sort of the flirts of the people who Look at something on and maybe engage with something on social media, the fans come to our website, probably sign in to maybe watch a live stream or something like that, and then fanatics. We would measure them, probably more, maybe not necessarily playing fantasy, maybe someone who starts a fantasy league, but definitely someone who buys a ticket to a match, you know, they're starting to actually, people who put their hand in their pocket to engage with cricket in some way, that's what we consider our real bottom of the funnel, holy grail sort of high value customers. And, you know, if you sort of broadly sort of look at it, you know, I think you'd be roughly doing. You know, 90%, 9%, 1 percent sort of would be something along those lines across our audience. now, you know, there's there's ways to commercialize all of those fans for, for cricket. Again, we're fortunate that India matches are on, are widely available for free in India. And so, you get really, really high scale sort of, um, engaging with people who may not be belonging to our site, but can still watch on TV. So, it's not a perfect science, but that's sort of broadly how we characterize people.

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 18:30

And Sid, does that in terms of take us outside of cricket for a minute, for a moment then, what does that look like?

Siddharth Raman, Sportz Interactive: 18:34

Yeah, so I think in terms of splits it's single digit in terms of you know fanatics which is the hardcore fans and I think flirts should always be called at 75 to 80 percent and that key takes you to about another 10 to 15 percent for fans. And I think that's the opportunity, right? Because all the conversations that you see around fantasy are largely around fantasy, but fantasy is largely addressing that. You know, a single digit base or maybe, you know, early teams in terms of percentages in terms of total fan base. And this is not just for rights holders, but for franchises as well, teams as well, right? Because the opportunity you have to be able to come to attract flirts and then convert flirts to fans. And we've seen early signs of this, not just in the IPL, but a few of the other international customers that we've global. You know, federations and teams that we work with gaming and gamification have been a great way to move people down that funnel. And your drop off rates from you know, gaming to gamification are probably in the 20, 25 percent range, which is not a large number in the context of the base you're talking about, you're looking at over there, right? And then if you look at the, you know, the drop off from fans to fanatics, that drop off rate might be slightly higher because it does take A good amount of time and effort and investments to be able to convert fans to fanatics. And this is across sports like motorsport, football and a few other global ones based just with some of the customers that we work with.

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 20:04

So when we're looking at gaming, let's just look at that for a minute, because you can imagine someone like me, my head goes to what used to be called FIFA, but is now EA FC, that, is that the sort of definitive case study of What you're talking about in terms of gaming at the top of the funnel.

Finn Bradshaw, ICC: 20:24

Yeah, like I think the ultimate, product for a sports organization is one that, Caters both to top of the funnel and then within itself can starts the flywheel, got to use the word flywheel if we're doing something on digital, to, yeah, to move people down the funnel and the products that EA have built their FC product in particular, traditionally had that console game that, was relatively easy to pick up, but you still needed a console and. You had to wait once a year or so for a new release to come out. And then, you know, then they did do updates on mine. But now they've got that mobile product. And then the real thing that's unlocked it is the, Ultimate Team product that sort of works across both of those where you you know, you're rewarded for re engagement. The revenue numbers that you sort of see reported around what that's done for their business, that side of the business has been phenomenal. And so that combination of all those products they have does, caters, you know, again, back to my my household as a microcosm for the sports industry, caters for a nine year old boy who wouldn't watch a whole football match but wants to keep his streak alive so to open, so he can open new packs. Through to, you know, the most hardcore football fans I know who, you know, get together to play really intense tournaments against each other. But at the heart of all of it is you're playing real players, real teams in stadiums that look like the real thing. So that connection with the sport still really remains strong there. And you know, to bring it back to fantasy, like I have a fantasy team with my son and he can fill it out, not because he's watched a lot of TV. Broadcast, but because he's played a lot of FIFA and the AFC on mobile, so like it is the gold standard at the moment for being able to both bring people on top of the funnel, but really turn that into awareness and interest in the broader sport.

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 22:27

So Finn from the ICC's perspective, you're looking at that. I look at that and say, right, FIFA had that, and then they've let it go, you know, and there's a, that is a question why they would do that. And the other question is, is there a cricket equivalent? And if not, where would it come from? Would it come from within the ICC or would it be a third party gaming company that would,

Finn Bradshaw, ICC: 22:52

Yeah, with respect there are many cricket games out there, and with respect to all of them, there isn't anything of the quality and scale of EAFC, not not even really close. And I actually think it's an existential threat to our sport that we don't have that, because you, there are many, many stats out there that talk to Gen Z's relationship to gaming, and all of them come back to the thing that If it's not the most popular form of entertainment, it's right up there. and not only is it a popular form of entertainment, but it's often where a lot of their communities are built and fostered through that. And so it's really, it's a large part of their lives beyond just sort One way entertainment. So it's really important and if you don't have a product that can reach people in those and be a part of their life, you know, part of their world there, that's the equivalent of saying I wasn't on broadcast TV 10 years ago or 20 years ago. And so. You know, how many sports that weren't on broadcast TV managed to reach really the high scale? They didn't. And so, yeah, the ICC, we've been thinking really hard about how can we at the ICC foster the industry to create a game that does for our sport what AFC has done for their football across the world. And we would never build one like, you know, same way we don't build our own websites. We don't build our own fantasy products. But what we try and do is. A combination of leveraging all the rights we've got, running the right sort of processes to find the right partners, you know, and trying to take a more strategic long term view of that. And, you know, in particular, recently been sort of talking to our members about how can we do something collectively? Because, again, I don't think this works if you have products that, you know, as a fan, you don't want to go to one product and play. one league and then you have to go to another product and go to, to, you know, to play another player or a different team. Like, I would say, as it was before, EFC, most people would have said it wasn't the best game to play, compared to Pro Evolution, but but EA got all the rights, and so as a fan, you want to play the real life games, and then, you know, get all the marketing and stuff on the back of that from the players, from the teams, and so they won. And I, you know, I'd say if if you had a situation, those teams were split, you wouldn't have, it's not like the market size would have just been, they would have had half of each, the overall market size would have been smaller. I've got no doubt about that. And so the reason why not only did EA win, why they grew the market size to what they have is because of that, totality of all the rights that they've got within that game. Plus really great games, really great game design. Economies, etc.

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 25:37

So did what went right for that to work then? So in terms of, did Sid, there's a conflict, I don't understand. There's the bit between you, You've got the data, you've got, you're on the supply side of this question. What do you need from a governing body to do a best in class game? Do the governing body get in the way sometimes? I'm just trying to work out what the real world answer is to why EA won that in football and was it to do with just rights minutiae and not being able to deliver that back to the game? I just explain what this what's going on because I from my naive perspective I'm wondering why one company is better than the other

Siddharth Raman, Sportz Interactive: 26:23

So I think that it's important to differentiate between what EA and FIFA had in terms of the, you know, the nature of the agreement or the licensing and being able to deliver. And to Finn's point, I don't think anyone expected it to be that big by the time you know, the deal was up for it came up for renewal and, you know, the, Fortunately, unfortunately, whatever happened ended up happening. But to answer your question, my sense is it is more a business call than anything else, but for the right shoulders that we've worked with you know, whenever we, there's alignment on, we need to do what's right for the fan and there's a longterm view in terms of fan engagement and fan engagement objectives, marrying into business and commercial objectives. We've never faced any issues, right? No, one's going to you know, say, Hey, I invested this in this game. It's one, one month or two months in. Why is there any, you know, audience acquisition ROI or investment ROI or commercial ROI that I'm seeing on this? So, I think once there's alignment on those objectives, things kind of fall into place, specifically for EA and FIFA. I think Finn might have a stronger POV than I do, given he's been quite closely involved in this space from an ICC perspective.

Finn Bradshaw, ICC: 27:33

I think it was probably, um, yeah a combination of it, but I think it's, in the gaming space, there does tend to be one clear winner in a title. it's rare in a category that you sort of have multiple winners in it, you know, especially that can change over time, but at at any one sort of point in time and um, and know, EA, it's not like they, they were, newbies who just stumbled across some rights, like they clearly had a really strong strategy. I think the really. Interesting thing listening to them is, you know, they did a keynote a month or so back, and other than having to say a lot of stuff about AI, because, you know, that's legislated now that if you work in tech, you've got to talk about your AI strategy. The interesting thing was, they started to talk about, Okay, in a football fan's life, there's two hours of live, you're not going to be broadcast for that, but the rest of the week is up for grabs. So, how can EA start to win the battle for the rest of that week? And I've never heard them articulate that so clearly. And so that means them starting to push into stats, into fantasy, into other things that complement their, you know, market leading proposition in, in gaming. And so, you know, that, that's a really interesting sort of direction for them to take. And it comes back to what you said at the top of this show. You know, the phone is in our product pocket the whole time. The idea, I actually think like in, you know, not too distant future, the idea of going to your TV and pulling out a PlayStation and waiting for it to load up and having to load and all that sort of stuff will seem really to, the new generation of gamers. And that's, that's already the case in places like India, you know, mobile is just so dominant there. And the power of mobiles means the quality of games is much greater than what, you know, people used to sort of think mobile games meant things like stick cricket, the quality of them is much, much higher now. And so the future of gaming is. What is the thing in your pocket that can entertain people for a minute or for two minutes, not what is, you know, What is the thing that people pull out from the cupboard and then spend a couple hours on? It's still going to be people who spend that kind of out that kind of time on gaming, you know don't get me wrong on that, but I think future will wins that battle for for the the entertainment option in people's pockets and You know, and I think that's why all the projections, you look at the projections for the Indian gaming market and this excludes pay to play fantasy. The Indian gaming market is phenomenal and that's because it is set up to explode because they've got a large population, a growing economy, cheap data, great connectivity.

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 30:30

So presumably agree with that. Do you?

Siddharth Raman, Sportz Interactive: 30:32

Yes, I do. And I'd actually just like to add a few things to what what Vin said, right? When he spoke about what EA mentioned about the, you know, the two hours of the game is something you don't want to touch, but rest of the fans life. So again, we've seen this evolve over the past decade or so where a lot of the fan engagement for sports organizations has evolved from local and match day to global and everyday. So if you are a Premier League football club, or if you are you know, any international federation like the ICC, your fans are no longer just relevant, you are no longer relevant for your fans just on match day and in venue, you could be a Premier League or a Manchester United fan sitting in Bangalore who will never make it to Old Trafford in his or her life, but the club needs to find a way To be meaningful enough and be relevant for you and feel free to replace United with any other football club or any other international federation and that's why we're seeing a lot of you know, gaming activations become relevant for them. And this entire piece on global and everyday, a great hook for that is gamification. So to add gaming and gamification. So to add to what Finn said, apart from the mobile gaming space For franchise and rights holders, it's this simple, easy to play, low cognitive load, like a pre match predictor, who's going to score the most goals, who's going to score the most runs, when will the first goal be scored within the first five minutes. So something that's very low cognitive load, but keeps you hooked pre match. And then also is incentive enough for you to want to then come in and watch whether what you predicted turned out to be, you know, turned out to be true or no. And then during the match, you know, what more could you do? Could there be light poles, the kind that. You know, Fin's Kids played during the Women's World T20 that again, keep you hooked. Those are great ways for, we've seen for rights holders and teams to be able to acquire first party data again. This cannot be a sports business podcast without talking about first party data. So the opportunity to be able to capture and enrich first party data is where gaming, gamification and fantasy plays a big part.

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 32:31

okay. Right. We need, let's talk about fantasy then because, so Finn, you're you've been around fantasy for a long time. I know you're looking at your CV. There is it's not a new thing, but I'm, you know, sitting here in the UK, it's a sort of cultural phenomenon now, you know, the the Premier League. Fantasy game, you know, virtually everyone I know plays it and obviously it's a self selective group, but how it's evolved has surprised me and how it's become so central to the experience of being a football fan and. Again, it comes back to the stuff that Sid was mentioning there about the data, the collection and of use in making it, turning it into useful information that is then part and processed as part of the game. Just give us a bit of backstory to how we got here

Finn Bradshaw, ICC: 33:22

Well, the reason why fantasy works at its heart and it's continued to work is because it delivers the thing that all of us in digital say that we're aiming to do. We always put around the word communities. And, you know, what we're doing is we're creating online communities because it sounds like we're not talking about ones and os, we're talking about people. And fantasy does that and it does it extraordinarily well. Because at its heart, it started with a bunch of sports fans, you know. sitting in the rotisserie lounge York, I think, baseball fans who wanted a way to, um, you know, basically prove to each other who knew more about baseball and they created what became Fantasy. And it's grown over the last 30 years and sort of started late 80s early 90s and then really accelerated with the internet because it obviously made a lot easier. But it became really central to a fan's life because it gave you bragging rights over people you knew in real life. And, you know, and it became, you know, 90 percent of, you know, my group chat bans. You know, in any one season is probably fantasy related, whether that's NFL, NFL, whether it's AFL, whether it's Premier League, it uses technology to enhance the real world experience is what you're always. In Australia, a while ago, I worked for Newspork in Australia and worked for the Herald Sun, the biggest newspaper in Melbourne, and we were, we ran a fantasy competition for AF, for Australian football, the AFL there. It wasn't the official game. We had no rights to it. But what we had was we thought we had an algorithm. And we thought. It was better at approximating real world performance, so better rewarded, better players than the official game. And we had a newspaper that in those days had a large audience, because this was way back in the distant past. When we got to that stage of going, oh crap, we've given away everything for free on the internet, and now we're losing money, we need to find a way to charge money. And so we started to work out what products would people pay for. When we launched subscriptions, the number one driver for people signing up initially for those subscriptions was the ability to get live scores for their fantasy team. And so that was the first time I saw this sort of, you know, power for like, this was so important to people's lives. that they were prepared to pay for, you know, essentially getting their scores in real time, rather than waiting for the end of the match. all the stats show that people who play fantasy consume a lot, watch a lot more TV, broadcast, consume a lot more online, and so ultimately You know, a more valuable, um, consumer of your sport. And, And that's initially why sports invested so heavily in it. Bit different in some markets like India where it's, invested Bit different in some markets like India where people play to win money, to show their their skill and they get rewarded for that through money. Like it was in the US prior to legalization of gambling there. So, fantasy is, the term fantasy is a bit skewed in the Indian market, but in other, you know, regulated gambling markets, it acts there as a driver for engagement and that's how sports get rewarded for it. And so, you know, sports like us have been, first and foremost, really keen on fantasy because of those things that the flywheel, that it helps the flywheel to grow. But, so we did a trial during the men's T20 World Cup recently, where we brought in our first. It's a rewards program where people got rewarded with a certain number of runs for doing various activities online and then that moved them up a tier and they got access to better rewards, you know, not, not world breaking idea here. When we're working out what should you get rewarded for? We put a huge multiple on people who formed fantasy leagues because they're the people, you know, that move. You all know, you've all, You've got always sets up the fantasy league or, you know, um, you know, Tony Singh from the, you know, ECB's got an NFL tips comp that seems like half the industry he's probably hates me now. Everyone will want to sign up to it, but, um, you know, but you've got those people who are real drivers of behavioral change engagement and stuff like that. And so I think it really is, um, incumbent on sports to try and find those people and award those people first and foremost. And then secondly, the data we get out of it. Like, so, by rewarding people for doing things like entering a team, changing their captain, because we're rewarding them, we can then track all that behaviour. And so then, you really knew who were your most engaged fans, but also you could see who were actually the players they were selecting, or, you know, which teams were they most engaged with. There's not huge shocks in cricket, but the rather than relying on asking people, you could actually see what their behaviors were in real life. And in a way, the data was a bit overwhelming. So much came out of it. It was a really interesting to start to see. What you can learn from people's real life behaviors rather than just asking their intent to do stuff.

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 38:31

Sid, it's that difference between the sort of information you're getting is real. It's not, I'm not answering a market research panel here. I've said before, but it's a bit like, you know, when the doctor asks you how much I drink a week, this reveals it. Sniff to I'm telling him. So there's a, yeah, your, in terms of how that then can be applied. So people listening to this, yeah. on who might be working at club level. Is fantasy something that's just not appropriate to them? Because I've seen sometimes individual clubs go about trying to sort of create a fantasy product and I can see the appeal of it. And it's, I think, you know, we've mentioned their gaming and also fantasy. And fantasy are the two best examples of the sort of abstract idea of monetizing the fan and growing and the funnel and all of these things and we'll get to sort of what that means for enterprise value in a minute, but talk to me about fantasy and the sort of information that. is garnered and where it's appropriate, where it works and where it doesn't.

Siddharth Raman, Sportz Interactive: 39:35

Yeah, so I think straight up fantasy makes the most sense at a rights holder or a league level because you would want to spread yourself as wide as possible and appeal to fans across all teams. The moment you know, you're trying to do it as a franchise, you're restricted by the players that you have. on your own roster. It's very difficult. And that legitimacy is lacking to a certain degree, right? So, I think that's one, but that doesn't mean that it shuts out options for other teams to not do any kind of gaming activity, and which is why this is where the gaming and gamification comes in, right? And in terms of just fantasy itself, Finn spoke about, you know, the kind of data you're able to glean. It's a great way to truly understand what fans. Think on how fans behave. This is proper behavioral data and not performative data, right? You're able to figure out who's the most, who's actually the most favorite player for fans, who's getting picked the most, et cetera. You're able to do, and data doesn't lie, right? And some of the other things that we've seen is, you know, fantasies also, when you have a lot of other options to drive fan acquisition and drive signups for quite a few of our customers, as you've seen anywhere between. 60 to 70 percent of first party data capture during a season actually comes through fantasy because that's the, to, to Finn's point, this entire socialization angle around it, the moment you have leagues or, you know, you can create your own you know, your own communities to compete against friends. That's a massive hook for people to come in fantasy helps you understand fans better, helps you enrich fan data, and at the same time, a huge driver for acquisition at a league and a rights holder level.

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 41:11

Finn mentioned earlier about betting and the obvious, you know, a lot of the conversation here can be then directly applied to the betting market. And in America, you know, in the States, we've had this situation, you've got the duopoly, you know, FanDuel and DraftKings were there and people were paying, they had, you know, so those companies had the wallets, they knew the marketplace. And then as it's moved You know, state by state becoming a legalized betting sector, though they are the incumbents and it's essentially, you know, you've got lots of people trying to jump into that marketplace, but it's incredibly difficult to break that duopoly that sits at the center of the market. And sometimes people reference India in a similar way, and there are echoes there of what happens in its relationship. So fantasy, can you just explain what that is? Is fantasy a betting product in India?

Siddharth Raman, Sportz Interactive: 42:00

Short answer, no, it's not. And there's legal precedence for this to call it a game of skill. Betting is called a game of luck. And there's a very clear legal framework for which, within which a fantasy game or a fantasy operator needs to allow fans to create their teams, which makes it as a game of luck. Close, which brings it as close as possible to the real world action. So it can't be pick three, pick five and make your team, right? If it's a pay to play game, you need to choose 11. There are certain constraints that need to be set. So, it's definitely not betting in India. It's classified as a game of skill and all all daily fantasy operators over here need to operate within that framework.

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 42:36

And what, and Dream 11, what is that? So

Siddharth Raman, Sportz Interactive: 42:39

It's a pay to play daily fantasy game, which operates, which is a game of skill and operates within this legal framework.

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 42:46

that's to say, that's the sort of equivalent of a fan jewel type product just for the Indian market. What does this mean for, again, the bigger question of enterprise value for leagues and for individual teams. So this conversation is sort of putting meat on the bones of big, those big abstract words of fan data, first person party data, engagement, community. And then in the hands of a private equity group, they're saying, okay, well, the big story here is we need to move sport away from it or wean it off. It's broadcast rights dependency. It's that mentality that it's a broadcast and sponsorship product into monetizing the fan more explicitly. And growing the value of individual franchises and teams and or leagues or tournaments to a degree that is based more, a bit more like, as we said, platforms, where are we in this? And this, cause it feels like this is a central cog to it that I imagine the money people are looking at this conversation and saying, yeah, okay, well we need to. make it explicit because we can see, you know, we've seen something like the Gujarat, you know, appear on the scene and suddenly they're being quoted as a billion dollar franchise. A lot of that is based on generating

Siddharth Raman, Sportz Interactive: 44:07

Yes.

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 44:07

From nowhere. It's not just a broadcast rights product. So what do you think about that? Just link, build me a bridge from this sort of conversation about digital and first party data into the enterprise value question.

Siddharth Raman, Sportz Interactive: 44:18

So it comes back to what I said at the start of this podcast, where sports organizations need to start thinking like platforms and platforms are valued based on how well they know their fans or consumers. So the, every earnings call for Netflix talks about how many new paying subscribers they've added. I think that's the direction in which, you know, it's not going to be how many paying fans we have for sports organizations, but how many, how much fan data are you sitting on basis, which are, you know, your fans really well. And it's better to have 1 million fans who you have 10 different data points about versus 15 million fans who we don't, not too much about, right. And that with private equity investment coming into sport, that's a big driver of of enterprise value. And. Everything we spoke about today from a gaming gamification perspective all kind of boils down to that. The reason you see sports organizations you know, interest getting peaked by this is at the end of the day, it helps you build build the right kind of audience on your platform, build a good understanding of them. And over a period of time that helps you drive drive enterprise value and enterprise value for a platform is going to come on the back of how many, how well do you know your customers? How well do you know your subs? For a Netflix or a, you know, for a, for an Amazon, same thing for sports organizations over there.

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 45:34

And Finn from, from a a sort of classic governing body position. That the ICC would be. What's the objective? For you guys, because it's, you know, there's, there's nuance. There's always a, it's not as a right across from private

Finn Bradshaw, ICC: 45:47

No, that's right. I mean, I think there's definitely been this sort of headlong rush towards, um, measurement of data and engagement. And I think a lot of it has been driven by sort of private money coming into sport where they're used to, you know, coming into a widget factory. And how do you work out whether that widget factory, you know, is overvalued or undervalued where you look for certain data points and you put it into a spreadsheet know, you work out if there's sort of a gap there you can, um, make money out of. And so there's been a bit of trying to work out You know how to do that for sports teams and so, you know, and a lot of the measurements pretty opaque or slow to come or, you know, like, you know, if you're a global governing sport, like it takes us months to get a TV rights report back from all the licensees and they're not all using that, you know, like and trying to consolidate them and things like that. So part of it has been like this has been a good proxy for your popularity or the strength of your brand. Now of course, you know, the old Charlie Munger thing of like, you know, show me the, um, incentives and I'll show you the outcome or whatever, like it did drive, then it has driven a bit of like, Oh, you want a lot, you know, a lot of data. Awesome. You know, if we have a lot of data and a lot of engagement, well, then we must be really valuable. Awesome. Let's go and do that with regardless to sort of how you're getting that or what that means. And so The bit that, you know, I think that sports are generally focused on now, but really do need to be focused on is that data and that, um, engagement is always tying you back to the core product because, you know, as I said at the start, like that sport delivers these amazing emotional high points that other people don't, but if your engagement isn't really based around that, if it's based around on, you know, on, um, Social media around link baiting and sort of sensationalist stuff there or I would even argue It's fantastic that Sports have investing in the experience stuff the experience economy sort of things and you know Like as a fan, it's great to get have some decent food available and things like that But if you're doing that without any focus on the core product and make sure that there's competitiveness and there's, you know, um, context and there's tension and all those sorts of things, then eventually you're just competing against Taylor Swift and you're probably going to lose that battle. And so that's where I think things that are really interesting to us are products, whether that's mobile gaming or whether it's fantasy. that are intrinsically linked back to real world performance because then you're tying all your digital activity And your engagement back to things that no one else can compete with. and so I think, you know, the, the big challenge for us in the sports, tech space is to make sure that our, our strategies and our stories Proveably delivering things in the real world rather than just doing engagement for engagement sake because You know, that can turn to to dust in an instant.

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 48:55

Yeah. There's sort of echoes of the sport as entertainment trend there, it's interesting looking at, so TGL is going to launch in January, you know, this golf. Tournament. It's a screen, you know, screen based. I don't know what it is because we haven't seen it yet, but it's a, you know, you've got a lot of money in there. You've got franchises, you've got the usual sort of apparatus of a new sports product, but it's a television entertainment product. And I can see where and how you get there. The question will It's link back to the sport exactly as you say, because sometimes I think if we're going from the avids or the sports fan, who's there for the sport, the search for the new audience, the big eventer, you get to these people that are, you know, they're wealthy enough to pay the tickets and the ticket is framed around their wallet and you go after them, but really, Are they there for cricket or the rugby or for golf or for football? It's just whatever's on that week. And the quality of the event experience becomes very important because they'll turn up and they'll say, right, okay, you know, I my, I've got a very raised set of expectations in terms of what I think a live event should be. And you say it's in the, product consideration set with Taylor Swift and, Glastonbury or whatever it is. I can see sort of the echoes here in the digital realm where you start to say, right, okay, well, we need to create products that are reaching out. And there's two dangers. One, you dumb the sport down to the extent, I mean, as I said earlier about the scroll that it's just becomes a sort of, you know, a dopamine based. sport, and you then turn up and blimey, you know, someone's grinding out a 50 before, you know, before lunch and they're not, you know, low and behold, they're disappointed. So there's a sort of expectation setting on mobile, which might not be very difficult, if not impossible to sustain. But then you've also just got the, okay, it's just another, as you said earlier, it's just another thing on the scroll. So it's quite hard to know how you stop that from happening, that it just becomes another piece of content. You can always find, I mean, I, you know, we all know, I, you can always find a sort of attribution back or a good story in the data to tell, but fundamentally, I think that one of the challenges is what is sport in this realm? What do you getting slightly philosophical, but

Finn Bradshaw, ICC: 51:16

No, I love it. you're in my wheelhouse now. Um, The, because I think the two things that we kind of come to a few times today. is like that community and I do believe like that people are going to continue to search for some sort of community and you know that's part of the strength of a lot of the online games but sport has been consistently proven over hundreds of years to be really good at doing that and yeah to sort of take it to a ridiculous extreme you know you I'm a Liverpool fan, most of the audience groans, but it means I can go to any city in the world and there'll be a bar where they eat. Greet me warmly and I can watch with other people. You know, like it, what else do I have in my life? Well, being a Celtics fan and a Geelong Kaz fan also does that, but like, I also love the music of Leonard Cohen. I'm not sure where I'd know where to go to find other people who

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 52:11

That'd be a quiet night at the

Finn Bradshaw, ICC: 52:13

for

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 52:13

whining on about, Greek islands and poetry.

Finn Bradshaw, ICC: 52:17

Maryanne. Yeah. Um. like, so sport, delivers communities and it provides these moments of like emotion, high emotional, uplift And engagement, I mean, uplift or downlift, but you know, points of emotional high points that other things don't. And the, the great challenge for us is how do you. deliver that to people when they're just looking at the phone or, um, dipping in and out of something or because if what they're looking for is that, then the grinding out to the 50, like, you know, Richard, you were all three of us on this podcast would know, probably the most memorable cricket moments Is the number 11 grinding out five overs to save a test match for a draw? You know, like that's so like if you if you get the storytelling and all that other stuff, right? And so really technology should be just a better way of delivering that because you can tell more stories and you can definitely like What we do is much more engaging than you know What what we used to do which was relying on a an article in the newspaper It's just we have a lot more competition now. And so It's just about, you know, and so that's why you need to be on those platforms. You need to be everywhere else because there's the more competition. But but I think inherently sport will continue to win because it just delivers things that people will always look for. And that so far, very few other competing entertainment products can deliver.

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 53:44

Sid, there's a, I think there's a, it's interesting with, you know, cricket is a good example of this. And this is a case study. Gaming seems or was always said to have the answer to this. You know, this, the cliche of the Gen Z attention span is seen to be nonsensical when you say, right, okay, yeah, but they've been on that game for the last, eight hours straight. And then always the question is what can test cricket learn from gaming? I remember asking this question at an ICC business of cricket conference about 50, 12 years ago. And it was, and people say, yeah, there's a, you know, there's a sort of vague recognition that gaming has the answer. And I'm wondering if that's true and whether or not actually it's going about this sort of the wrong way around it. Actually, The answer's always been there in plain sight. It's something that's happening in that relationship with games is analogous with a longer form sport.

Finn Bradshaw, ICC: 54:41

would say one thing that gaming has done that most other entertainment sports hasn't done is really leverage the technology available. Like, so the biggest trend in gaming, change in trend in gaming is the growth of mobile games and the growth of, everyone's a gamer, you know, and so you look on a plane, number of people playing Candy Crush still, and how long has Candy Crush been around, but, you know, what are the equivalents, you know, it used to be Farmville on, you know, um, Facebook back in the day. And so that blew people's minds that, you know, women and middle aged people would be, would be gamers and they'll still look down on by a lot of people. But then you look at the gaming products, let's take Candy Crush, the way they use the haptics and the, features on an iphone or an Android phone, a mobile phone, you know, vibrates and the sound and everything like that to really drive that re engagement. And they've been phenomenal at that. And, A lot of the mainstream gaming world was slow to catch up to that stuff and again was probably a bit snobby about mobile gaming because it wasn't the hardcore guys that they grew up with. But I think as sport, you know, where we can definitely learn from is we probably think it's a bit cheap to reward people for doing things. You know, engaging with our website three times or whatever, or, you know, having a a cool vibration for a weekend or whatever, you know, like I'm not, I'm sort of being deliberately kind of a bit, um, blatant with it, but we haven't leveraged the full, you abilities of, the technology there to drive that re engagement in the way that gaming has. Gaming, the gaming industry collectively has been phenomenal then, particularly a lot of the Korean and Chinese. gaming studios.

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 56:27

What do you think Sid?

Siddharth Raman, Sportz Interactive: 56:28

Yeah, uh, and to your particular question on test cricket, I think that's a massive untapped opportunity in terms of it's not five days. You break it down into potentially 15 sessions and each session of two hours. How do you make every hour relevant for someone who comes in just at that point? Right. I think what might. The trap we sometimes fall into is the context of the game. Until that point, we seem to over index on, but if you're able to make a game relevant at that point in time itself, i. e., you're coming in on the third session of day one and in the last hour of play, you might, you know, as a fan, if you want to give him, you know, Is there, is there a gaming solution or a gamification activation to, for the fan to feel invested in that one hour itself, right, or the next five minutes of the one hour, say there's a number seven or number eight batting, they've put on 35 runs. Will they score a 50 partnership in the next? 30 minutes, right? And you emotionally get invested in the outcome of that because you've actually given or you've given your POV on that. Something as simple as that to take a version of the game like Test Cricket and make it relevant for fans. So I think there's a lot that can be done now. Unfortunately, most Test matches don't last beyond three days, especially if they happen in India now, but that's a separate story. But how do you make it relevant for fans?

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 57:45

put a spaz ball for you Sid.

Siddharth Raman, Sportz Interactive: 57:49

But, but there's an opportunity to, I think the moment and, and, come, you know, to the earlier point, you spoke about the essence and purity of sport. Uh, I think it's, how do you take that core and make it relevant for the times, which in my, you know, in my head, something that I just spoke about earlier, you take the test ticket format, you're not changing anything to that, but making that. That particular time of the game relevant for a fan whenever he or she comes in. How do you just make that relevance? And there's a term for what you called uh, for talking earlier. It's called thumbstoppers, something that makes you stop scrolling and hold your thumb there and watch what comes on your screen. So I think, how do you make sport relevant through thumbstoppers is

Finn Bradshaw, ICC: 58:30

you've got great terms Sid. the three F's and the, uh, the thumbs up.

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 58:37

I know, I've written down. I'm going to steal all this by the way Sid. And uh,

Siddharth Raman, Sportz Interactive: 58:41

I've stolen it from

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 58:46

I've got that down. I've got, you know, there's the what was it, there was another cracker. Hang on, I've got it written down. Local and match day. goes to global and everyday, which I absolutely love. Again, that's a whole conference there. There's a bit, there'll be people doing PhDs in that. I want to finish off on, again, these are, this is probably a sort of, I want to talk about Roblox just briefly because it's of the moment and I, you know, and again you see, okay, this, the NFL is in there, you see loads of sports appearing in that world and then you hear sponsors are going to get involved. What's it like in there? Is it, what do people see when they see a governing body of sport coming into their world? Because I always assume that I get the story from the PRs from the governing body, and it's a fantastic new frontier, and the kids are loving it, but I'm wondering what the kids think, and whether or not actually they want Sports governing bodies and teams and traditional their parents stuff invading their, their world. What do you think about that in terms of just that, that

Finn Bradshaw, ICC: 59:51

So I'll give you for the audience who are not familiar with Roblox, like it's a, an app that has a whole world of games. But you have your avatar or your, you know, your character that's you, not necessarily your name, but that can move around those various worlds, different games, a lot of the games you sort of go into and there's kind of a lobby and there's different games you can go off that. One of the really powerful things is that community. You know, you can go and play with your mates again back to the market study of the Bradshaw household. Um, You know, my son plays that while on a Google chat with his mates. They're all in the one game.

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 1:00:27

I hope you, I hope you're paying your kids for all this research they're

Finn Bradshaw, ICC: 1:00:30

With, with love Richard, with love. And, um, and so like it does that really well. The games at a glance are really simple, graphics are simple, which means it's relatively easy to load, which is why it can have, you know, a hundred million, hundreds of millions of games or whatever they've got there. Means tends to be quite high churn, like very rare does a game stay at the top of the charts there for a long time, so the kids hop around a lot. They're very simple games, pretty addictive, they reward them for the engagement through that sort of stuff. So, as a governing body, you sort of have two choices, you can either create your own game, and then you have to market it like anything else and get people to go there rather than whatever the game of the moment is, and that's what NFL have done, FIFA's done, Australia opened. Or you can do what we chose to do, where, as we were ahead of taking the World Cup to the US, you know, the whole point of taking the World Cup to the US is to grow awareness of both cricket but also ICC events with a U. S. audience. You know, how do you reach kids in the U. S.? Roblox is a fantastic platform for that. One of the challenges with commercializing the platform is such a high percentage of their audience is under 14. So we integrated with some of the most popular games at the time, and so like one of them was a thing called Bladeball. You literally have a big samurai sword and these balls bounce towards you and you cut them in half and you're all in this sort of arena doing it at the same time, whoever does it the most wins. So we turned one of those arenas looked like our pop up stadium in New York. put all the ICC branding on it and so, you know, kids were in there and they could see they could see our branding. But to your point, like So what? So in the games we did, we had, what they call non playing characters, but we had people there who were going and interviewing people and them before and after awareness of cricket, awareness of, the ICC and events like that. So we could track the increase of that over the period. But then the most interesting thing we did was, A lot of what people do is they collect rewards in the games to get things for their character, get a new hat, get a new backpack or whatever. One of the big things we had was you had to go out of Roblox and sign up and give us your details and then they'd bounce you back into Roblox and you got your reward for doing that. And that was actually one of our more successful data acquisition campaigns through the World Cup. And so it really answered that sort of question of, and so it comes down to it. I mean, Roblox is just another marketing platform for a sport, It's not sort of some magical, third way. It's, it's, it's just another marketing platform. Like you might choose to be on, on Facebook or on a billboard or whatever. It just happens to have a really, Pretty unique audience, how young it is. And people are doing stuff. So they engage with you. Like one of the, one of the games we had was called strong man. We have to drag things and we integrated, Emirates, you know, and so you're dragging luggage with Emirates on it and that's part of the reward. So if you're a brand person, you probably like the fact that someone's actually doing something with your brand. Relevant ish to your business. Product rather than just seeing your logo on something so that you know, it's a bit more fun than seeing a logo in the background Broadly, that's why Roblox is important. And so again, you know, it comes back to this thing Create places where people can form communities and interact with those communities and if you do that, well, you'll probably be successful

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 1:04:04

I didn't realize that it was its own world in that way, actually. said you make games for Roblox, is it, do they, do you have to be specific in terms of what you're creating for

Siddharth Raman, Sportz Interactive: 1:04:15

So, so we don't, but I think there's, to, to Finn's point there's, there's a massive opportunity for rights holders to actually, you know, work and develop on the platform to do exactly the kind of things that he just said. And I had nothing more to add because using a cricket analogy, when the batter's in form, the non striker stays at the other end. So exactly.

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 1:04:35

that the avatar stuff, John, we're just going to round off now, but and it's early research, but in just in terms of our relationship to our avatars, our relationship to our digital selves, what we think of ourselves, As people versus what the sort of people that we want to present. And, you know, it's always that Instagram face that it gets quoted, but there's, there was some interesting stuff around the U S. around the election and political movements as well in terms of how they are showing up. And one reading of the sort raid on the, or the, you know, the Capitol Hill thing. And last time around was that people were turning up as their avatars. They, they become, it's almost like they were sort of, they like lives.

Finn Bradshaw, ICC: 1:05:16

a bloke with the horns,

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 1:05:17

And that was his avatar. And he was role playing invading the uh, capital. So that. I think that's really under researched in terms of when we talk about fans, which version of us are you presenting and which version are we, you know, is the rights holder seeing, but that's a whole different

Finn Bradshaw, ICC: 1:05:35

just

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 1:05:35

get onto

Finn Bradshaw, ICC: 1:05:36

briefly the old age, old adage in social media is never look at the comments because there's a lot of people who are commenting purely in their avatar form and saying things that they wouldn't say. And we did a trial during the Women's World Cup where we got a firm to come in and run software that just hides anything, any toxic comments. So obviously it's just, it's mainly keyword search, but you can do very specific ones, even specific to certain players. And for women, you can imagine what some women, unfortunately cop online, they, you know, we got really positive responses for that. And probably to your point, it was probably a bit of an eye opener for us that we hadn't thought enough about if we're going to say this digital world is so important to us, and we want you as players to be out there putting your personalities out. So you're building relationships with fans and doing all that. Well, we also have a responsibility to make sure that's a safe space and. You know, I gave you the sell on Roblox. There's also like a lot of negatives around sort of stuff that can happen on those environments. And so, yeah, I think that that's going to be interesting. So I think reckoning as this world of engagement involves is, you know, what is the responsibility for us as a rights holder to create that as a safe space? And it's probably one of those ones that actually needs cross sport collaboration. But wow, that's another whole conference too.

Richard Gillis, Unofficial Partner: 1:07:04

That always goes well. Listen, I will get you back on. There's so much in this subject because I think what's interesting about it and you know, the sort of those three territories again, hat tip to Sid in terms of gaming, gamification and fantasy. I think they are so revealing of other issues as well. You know, there's the technical supply side, you know, who's providing the games and the, and that whole conversation. And in the business context, it quite often lands on deals and people have done a new deal or a collaboration with, but I think there's so much in there that is revealing on every level. So I think it's fascinating. so we'll get you back on, but in the meantime, Sid and Finn, thanks a lot for your time.

Finn Bradshaw, ICC: 1:07:46

Thanks so much, Richard. That was really fun.

Siddharth Raman, Sportz Interactive: 1:07:48

Thank you.