Football Index Q&A: A ball market

Hollywood legend Michael Douglas said that years after he starred in 1980s hit film Wall Street, fans would still tell him how the role he played as duplicitous corporate raider Gordon Gekko inspired them become to stockbrokers. You see, director Oliver Stone’s film pulled back the curtain on the testosterone-infused jungle of the ruthless trading floors and managed to capture the Zeitgeist of the ‘decade of excess’. As Gekko espoused, “greed is good”.

Wheeling and dealing on the stock markets has always been seen as a glamourous, white-knuckle ride, yet the intricate ins and outs of the business remain a bit of an esoteric mystery for most people. But what if you could blend the mechanic of buying and selling shares with the world’s most popular sport: football? Well, that’s what the Football Index set out to achieve with its ground-breaking product, which first launched in 2015, that allows users to buy and sell shares in players across the top European leagues for real money.

Popular with football ‘anoraks’, serious bettors and probably a few wannabe Gordon Gekko types, Football Index has carved out a niche within gambling and attracted a cult-like following, with users discussing trades on social media platforms and attending sold-out trader meetups organised by the Football Index team.

CMO Mike Bohan, who has previously worked for the Football League, Gamesys and Bodog, lifts the lid of marketing strategies to spread the product’s appeal beyond just clued-up City boys, and addresses whether there is a danger this around-the-clock product could become addictive for some users.

Mike Bohan of Football Index

EGR Marketing: What’s been Football Index’s approach to above-the-line marketing over the past 12 months and what has generated the best ROI?

Mike Bohan: We’ve focused on TV, radio and London Underground advertising so far this season and it’s really pulled hard for us. We took a season-long deal with Sky at the beginning of the season and we got [ex-BBC football commentator] John Motson to do the voiceover. In addition to that, we’ve taken a season-long deal with Talk Sport, which Motty also does the voiceover for, and we’ve done quite a lot of stuff on London Underground, which has worked brilliantly for us and it is really noticeable.

A lot of the other mediums that we advertise on can be a real slow burner, but with the London Underground we find that we’ll run a two-week campaign and we’ll immediately see an ROI on new customers and increased activity from existing users as well. Outside of that, it’s the typical mix online with programmatic and we run a lot of install campaigns through paid social. Facebook and Twitter have been particularly good for us, and we have got a pretty good Twitter community now and that does a lot to promote us.

EGR Marketing: Is Football Index targeting financial traders rather than your low-staking, casual Saturday afternoon ‘acca backers’?

MB: The average Football Index trader is in his 30s, is financially secure and is looking for some extended entertainment value they can’t find with a traditional bet. In a recent survey over 70% of our customers say they have either stopped traditional football betting or would have never considered risking their money on it. But these customers like what we’re doing because they appreciate the intellectual stimulation of a genuinely revolutionary platform. We’re not after ‘acca’ backers. Football Index thrives on considered customers who are looking more long term than the final whistle of the next match.

Football Index has always occupied its own category in many ways. It’s not the short-lived and expensive pastime that is synonymous with traditional football betting, nor is it a case of playing for only pride like fantasy games offer. Football Index has significant advantages over both. For starters, our traders have ‘skin in the game’ but, though the value of it may go up and down, we don’t just sweep the stake off the table.

EGR Marketing: Can this product and your marketing appeal to recreational bettors? After all, betting exchanges struggled to appeal to casuals, partly due to a lack of understanding around the concept?

MB: Fundamentally, I think people understand the concept of trading – it doesn’t matter if you are on a market stall buying and selling apples or buying shares in a FTSE 100 company. The principles of that are universally understood. But what we have tried to do is not make our product overwhelming sophisticated. We have got the right mix of challenge and intellectual stimulation. I think the difference between us and betting exchanges is they offer a lot more sophistication than we have at the moment.

We have tried to keep it simple and appeal to a broad range of customers. A lot of our customers do want more functionality that you would see on a traditional trading platform and we will be adding some, but for us it is about getting that balance of not alienating a massive would-be audience by overcomplicating the product, so that is another key focus next year. It’s about adding new functionality without turning it into a spaceship of buttons and things that make it very complicated.

EGR Marketing: How did the addition of the Performance Buzz, which pays out dividends based on players’ Opta stats, help spread the product’s appeal?

MB: When we initially launched the product, we wanted a winner every day, so we had this media monitor built that monitored the 25 UK newsfeeds [which determines Media Buzz dividends]. That was great, and we still continue to operate that as it really is about the trending player. When you get into the transfer windows it’s pretty exciting. But for the real ‘stattos’ of football, they wanted a much more tangible, performance-related metric to put their money behind.

The performance dividends mean we have seen an enormous increase in the number of engaged users. We’ve also gone a step further and introduced in-play dividends. When a player scores a goal, or assists a goal, we award shares in that player immediately. It’s an added bonus and a way of encouraging people who are a bit unsure of how the pay-outs and stuff work. If you own 10 shares in Neymar and he scores a goal you’re going to get 10 dividend pay-outs on the basis of that.

EGR Marketing: How important is word of mouth and the positive Trust Pilot reviews Football Index has racked up, as well as the trader meetups that you regularly organise?

MB: I think it’s critical really for what we are trying to do. I guess we knew from the outset that we were David versus Goliath with bet365 and Sky Bet and trying to capture the imagination of people who dabble in that or do traditional sports betting a lot. We identified pretty early on that we would have to do things differently and build trust that we were a real company and not some fly-by-night bookmaker. We engage with customers directly on forums, on social media, particularly Twitter, and the trader meetups are really just a way to people we want to hear their feedback, but we’ll also tell them our plans going forward and with product and marketing.

It’s an opportunity for those traders to invite would-be customers as well who are perhaps sitting on the fence. The fundamental thing there is building trust and getting feedback because they are quite a vocal bunch and are evangelical about the product and are quick to tell you things they don’t like, which is great because we can work on them. We have a community out there that includes a number of people who run a weekly podcast that interviews other traders. There are YouTube channels dedicated to Football Index and we have got three or four data analysis products that people are selling and are completely separate to our platform. So we have spawned a mini industry and mini community outside of our walled garden.

EGR Marketing: Has it surprised you how many Football Index-related Twitter accounts there are now with passionate customers offering advice, discussing trades and sharing their dividend pay-outs and portfolios?

MB: Yeah, I think it did come as a bit of a surprise. We managed to create something that was fiendishly exciting to so many people and I guess it really confirms there was that gap in the market because there are a lot people interested in statistics and we use Opta data to drive our win mechanic. It’s testament to the fact that we have a very strong proposition that people enjoy, and there is a big market out there with these people who want to monetise their football knowledge outside of traditional dumb bet, if you like.

We aren’t just some faceless gambling entity running off with wheelbarrows of peoples’ hard-earned cash. We had an idea that we could use social media differently to other brands with direct engagement and put personalities behind the brand. It’s been great for us and our target audience.

EGR Marketing: As it’s a 24/7 product with players managing a portfolio of investments as opposed to placing one-off sports bets, are churn rates quite low?

MB: They are certainly a lot lower than you would get in a traditional gambling outfit. If other bookmakers were to look at our retained rates and our number of active sessions and the engagement that our users have with the product, I think they would be very jealous. We are really focused at this time on growing the userbase and our actives, so CRM and getting that right is critical for us – that is one of our two main focuses, as they would be in any marketing department.

We have a great head of CRM and a great team of people working behind the scenes. And we have so much data. I guess that is our challenge; getting through that data, identifying patterns of how people are trading and how we should treat them. It is different from traditional sports betting in many ways, but we are in some ways in uncharted territory and I would say that is going to be a massive focus for us in 2019.

EGR Marketing: How conscious are you of responsible gambling and ensuring people don’t become addicted because it’s easy to see why something like this might almost take over someone’s life?

MB: We are absolutely committed to the gambling commission code of practice and licensing objectives around protecting vulnerable people and those with potential gambling problems. It’s a serious issue. We invented this platform because we got fed up with the traditional bookies rinsing the public for their hard-earned money. I genuinely believe we offer a much safer, more sustainable and long-term option for those who enjoy a bet.

EGR Marketing: What plans do you have for the next 12-18 months?

MB: We’ll certainly be looking to expand our activity in sponsorship, TV and radio. We have a raft of exciting new features which will be ready for the start of next season, including providing our customers with more stats, graphs, comparison tools and so on. A big focus for us next season is going into new territories. We’ve launched in Ireland, which is a really nice and relatively easy market for us to get in to.

We want to expand into other parts of Europe and accept customers from other parts of the world but there are some obvious challenges with that – currencies and which markets are most applicable for us. There are exciting times to come, beginning next season with potential European expansion but we’ve seen phenomenal growth in 2018 and we expect this to continue into 2019 and beyond.