Oddschecker Q&A: Content is king

As was the case for many affiliate businesses, 2017 was a transitional year for Oddschecker. Its parent company, Sky Betting and Gaming, alienated the affiliate industry by slashing its ties with lead gen partners to weather the regulatory storm in the UK, while the odds comparison site has since repositioned itself around content and being on the side of punters.

In August, Oddschecker hired George Elek as its new head of media relations with the responsibility of pushing the brand into the spotlight of the mainstream media. Since then, Oddschecker has ramped up its content-driven approach by producing regular podcasts, online videos and social media articles.

As the business begins to reap the rewards of its increased marketing spend, EGR Marketing sits down with Elek, as well as head of commercial Guy Harding and head of international Andy Lulham, to discover more about Oddschecker’s strategic lane switch, its plans to penetrate the printed press and its relationship with the 28 operators that line up on the Oddschecker Grid.

EGR Marketing: Why doesn’t Oddschecker identify itself as a traditional affiliate company?

Guy Harding: We feel the ‘affiliate’ label anchors our value to bookmakers into being just an acquisition channel. Our starting point is that we are first and foremost a product and service for users within the sports betting industry allowing them to find the best price, every time they are looking to place a bet. We are interested in providing our users the best possible experience in this regard – find, research, compare, place and track their bets all from one place. Indirectly this provides our partners value through customer acquisition, reactivation, turnover and brand exposure. In this way think very different from traditional affiliates who often focus on acquisition as their only KPI. Our new app (Bet Hub) is demonstrable of this notion and contains very little in the way of ‘new offer’ sales messaging – it’s just a great product, built for our customers. In the same way that the Racing Post wouldn’t call themselves an affiliate, we would also not subscribe to that label.

EGR Marketing: Does Oddschecker generate more price-savvy punters?

GH: Most of the data suggests that our site users still bet with the less aggressively priced bookmakers. In our Premier League betting for instance, Paddy Power and Sky Bet are two of the widest priced operators but still receive the second and third most clicks, so there is obviously something else happening in the customer’s mind set. We know punters like coming back to us and we know the investment we have made in content has strengthened our domain authority and allowed us to rank very highly in the terms that drive the most traffic, so we hope operators will use Oddschecker to piggy-back their own messages.

Andy Lulham: We probably operate more like a traditional affiliate in some of our European and international territories where we are much newer in the market with a much smaller user-base of players and we have only recently established relationships with local operators, albeit our ambition is to move those businesses in the same direction as the UK one. When those markets become more mature we will try and evolve in a similar way.

EGR Marketing: How does Oddschecker operate internationally?

AL: We have been operational in the UK since 99 but we are still trying to establish a real player-base overseas where we can learn from the UK business. We are now fully operational in Australia and we have operational websites in Germany, Italy and Spain. We have an office in Australia and are a legal entity there with four full-time employees down in Sydney, so that is the most established of the four territories outside of the UK which will be scaled up at the right time.

Oddschecker’s George Elek discusses Arsenal’s new manager odds on Sky News

EGR Marketing: How does the Oddschecker product differ abroad?

AL: From a tech perspective, the international part of the business runs off a single code base on a responsive platform, designed to be mobile first and built in a way that allows us to scale quickly into new territories. We took a couple of backwards steps from where the UK website was and we’re still behind, but we are getting there and looking ahead we will be able to expand our footprint quickly and efficiently which sets us up well for future growth. From a content perspective, the core of each site is the same and underpinned by odds comparison, but we can localise so, for example, the Australian product has a horseracing centre, while our European sites are far more football centric. Editorial and tipping content is naturally tailored to each country’s requirements, but shared and translated when relevant.

EGR Marketing: Why has Oddschecker invested so heavily in content output? 

George Elek: We’ve done a lot of in-house content whether its podcasts or preview videos and we have also been working with bookmaker partners to leverage their talent. We worked with Kindred brands; Unibet and 32Red at the Cheltenham Festival, curating co-branded content with their horseracing ambassadors. It’s beneficial for both parties as we host it on our platforms but advertise their content. For PR, we hired somebody to work around the clock, trying to get us into print media. He has revolutionised our SEO strategy, so Oddschecker was in the daily Cheltenham live blogs for The Sun, The Mail, The Mirror and even BBC Sport.

EGR Marketing: Are there plans to penetrate the broadcast media?

GE: For me, broadcast outreach is going to take more time. It’s one thing sending news outlets a press release and almost doing their job for them, but it’s a bit harder persuading somebody to let you come onto their show. I have done a few interviews with BBC Radio Oxford and BBC Radio Leeds about new manager markets and we are trying to secure a weekly slot with City Talk which is a radio station in Liverpool.

Arsene Wenger’s departure announcement last Friday, one of the biggest sports news stories this year, led to live TV interviews with Sky News, France 24 and London Live, as well as a radio interview with BBC 5Live in the morning.

EGR Marketing: Are you worried about how the gambling industry is portrayed in the mainstream media?

GE: We want to position ourselves as an independent voice for the industry that media companies can trust. Ideally in 18 months or so journalists will have my number and they will be able to call me for a comment on any story.

GH: Sarah Harrison touched on this and the overall level of industry trust is pretty much at an all-time low, so Oddschecker wants to position itself on the side of the punter as we want them to go where the value is without looking at just one or a cohort of operators. If you’re a producer at a news outlet then you would have to be very careful about pushing one operator or the industry at all, purely because of this underlying stigma surrounding the industry. We want to be the punter’s champion really- we want to help them – thereby creating reason and rationale for news outlets to give us a voice.

EGR Marketing: How can operators get on the Oddschecker Grid?

GH: We’re in a situation at the moment where due to the way the desktop site works, the grid is at full capacity. We have 28 operators on there, four of which are exchanges, so we can’t actually add any more. Operators that want to join or we think are a good fit would have to be strong enough for us to justify ending a commercial relationship with an incumbent. Desktop is still growing, but mobile is growing very quickly and there is no limit to the amount of operators we can have on that platform. There are operators we work with like LeoVegas that we’d love to be on our grid but they are not there currently so we keep in conversation. It has to be consistent with what our users want as well as a good breadth of offering, because if we lose that wide range, then it counters our underlying mantra of being user-first.

EGR Marketing: Is Oddschecker working on any new products at the moment?

GH: We have started recently doing betting widgets for publishers, so we serve Sky Bet prices across Sky Sports News’ digital estate and we have also been trialling them on The Mirror. We are looking to branch out not only with different publishers but also with different operators to make it easy for readers who want to get a bet on while staying within an article. The Telegraph does this well at the moment and it is a new avenue that we are planning to go down.