Jesper Jensen: Sports betting industry is missing out on big data

Jesper Jensen: Sports betting industry is missing out on big data

In this interview with CalvinAyre.com’s Stephanie Tower, Jesper Jensen of iGaming Asia explains the importance of big data for sports betting operators.

Big data within sports betting is becoming more and more important in the acquisition and retention of customers. Unfortunately, many sportsbooks have only scratched the surface of big data despite their desire for information.

Big data, according to iGaming Asia’s Jesper Jensen, is important to increase consumer engagement but few operators have realized that.

“I think, if we talk about big data first of all, I think that’s where we are missing out in the industry today,” Jensen told CalvinAyre.com. “Today, you have a back office for operators. You have reports. You can only run those reports because they’re predefined. If you’re the CEO and for big operator, you want a specific report, you need to go to your business intelligence team and you need to request it. If you’re lucky, you get it two days after.”

To prove his point, Jensen cited the case of sports betting products being offered in Asia and in western countries. He said that customers in Asia prefer to bet on only two outcomes while Europeans tend to have different betting types.

This information had been gleaned by thoroughly analyzing high quality deep data, he said.

“It’s very different, because it is different culture in Asia when it comes to betting. In Asia, it is mostly binary markets. It means there’s two outcomes you can bet on. In Europe, you have a lot of different betting types,” Jensen said. “You can bet on Home, Go or Away, who’s going to get the first goal, who’s going to get the first red card. It is basically turning the European model upside down. What’s popular in Europe is not so popular in Asia.”

By understanding the data, Jensen stressed that operators may be able to make compelling calls to action.

“You don’t want a CFO running a report on a Friday afternoon and let it run into Monday. By the way, the cycle is down during the weekends,” Jensen said. “You really need to look at your big data because there are so many low hanging fruit and there are millions to be saved depending obviously on the size. If you don’t have access to the data, you don’t know how to go to the data and analyze them, you have an issue.”