SiGMA Malta panel: Betting for the TikTok generation
Attention spans were the key focus... wait, stay with me!... during a SiGMA Malta conference panel.
Key points:
– Esports market has more than doubled since Maurer founded Grid in 2018
– Gen Z and younger millenials have affinity with esports, which is more aligned with their desire for shorter form content
– Esports inherently provides more frequent meaningful wagering opportunities for players
Now is the time to get involved in esports, according to Grid Co-Founder and CEO, Moritz Maurer.
Maurer was the Head of eSports at Genius from 2015 to 2018, and as he says, at that time, there was not much of a marketing budget for esports.
Companies that wanted to engage in the category had to make a strong pitch, whereas now, he says virtually everybody has some form of esports offering in their armoury.
In 2018, he stepped away from Genius and started Grid, dead set on solving the problems within esports, namely through the democratisation of data.
Maurer was asked detail the calculable growth of the field since that time, and the jump in those seven years is eye-catching: the industry has more than doubled.
Counter-intuitively, Maurer tells the audience that when he was getting started, the industry was not particularly data-driven, and it’s that shift of focus to data that has powered the massive growth.
So the appetite for esports is growing, but people thinking of entering this market need to understand the audience if they’re going to maintain this growth.
Maurer explains that in the broadest terms, he splits the audience into a generation who maybe played games 15 years ago, but these days just enjoy watching and placing bets, and the 20-somethings that are playing a lot, and are more likely to engage with bitesize content.
On this question of attention-span, Maurer thinks that the gaming sector is both partially to blame, and beholden to provide the kind of content that its audience wants.
Many of this younger demographic are not watching real live sports anymore, and this contains lessons for those developing wagering opportunities within the category – while in real sports, the proliferation of data has created opportunities for micro betting, in esports, more important actions are happening more regularly.
In live football, during periods of little meaningful action, a player can bet on corners or throw-ins, but according to Maurer, these are not interesting or engaging for this demographic.
Contrastingly, in esports, he tells us that events are happening constantly in most games that materially affect the outcome, creating a far more tantalising wagering opportunity for today’s ‘TikTok Generation.’
Maurer also talks about how high-profile partnerships with developers and rights holders has had a hand in improving the esports vertical.
Today, he believes rightsholders are embracing esports far more than they used to and as a result betting sponsorship slots are opening up all over the place, where previously that avenue seemed blocked up.
Maurer puts this improving alignment down to his, increasingly realised, ambition of democratising data – rights holders have more involvement with their IP and are more and more seeing the opportunities for an aligned vision with esports providers.
With these foundations of knowledge and data now well in place in the category, Maurer reiterates that there is no better time for someone currently on the fence to take the plunge with esports.
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