Q&A: Dominic Mansour on why his new media-led gaming company will be more Sky Bet than Sun Bets

Dominic Mansour burst back into egaming headlines last week, with news he was taking charge of Bragg Gaming, a company created by the combination of UK digital media brand GIVEMESPORT and Oryx Gaming.

The firm, which aims to combine sports media and betting in a “similar way to Sky Bet” marks just the first phase in the creation of a “next generation” egaming company that covers the entirety of the ecosystem, according to Mansour.

Below, the former Full Tilt MD elaborates on his grand plans:

EGR: How do you take the best of the Sky Bet model and avoid the pitfalls that have derailed some other media-led brands?

Dominic Mansour (DM): GIVEMESPORT has 30m monthly uniques on its site, which is bigger than SkySports.com and The Sun. And we know because of the profiling Facebook does that over a million of them are regular UK gamblers. So we have a captive audience visiting a site, and we know they have a massive interest in gambling.  All we have to do is convert them into a decent product. We will launch GIVEMEBET in the next week. We’ll be working with SBTtech and Argyll, who have been really successful on a similar type of model. We’ve got the traffic, we’ve got best in class technology. It’s the opportunity of a lifetime.

EGR: How does the model change when your media customers mainly interact online rather than on TV?

DM: Ironically it’s a little bit easier going after streaming customers. There’s a huge trend of millenials no longer watching full games. They dip in and out, place bets and watch ten minutes. That plays perfectly for our position. The power of Sky Sports as a channel is so much more diminished than when Sky Bet launched. There was no BT Sports, no competition, and that audience was only consuming sport through their channel. Now it’s so diversified that we think its perfect for our business. We can put clips and highlights up, and the news alerts on the GIVEMESPORTS app are sometime quicker than the telly. Imagine, ‘Mo Salah just scored’ pops up, and you can click through directly to bet on Mo Salah to score the next one. That’s what the 21^st century betting experience is, and we can make that happen.

EGR: And how would you respond to the argument that these customers will already have a Sky Bet or bet365 account they’re happy with, so why would they switch?

DM: The simplicity of cross-sell is one advantage. People are fickle. The loyalty to a specific site has always been low and it’s only getting lower. So it’s about owning touchpoints around a consumer’s lifestyle. Sky Bet used to own that but it’s getting harder and harder to keep that integration tight following the Stars deal, whereas we are going to own all sides of that.

EGR: Is this a slight change of direction for you given your history at Full Tilt and the Health Lottery?

DM: I’ve covered sports betting in my time at GTECH so it’s not entirely new to me. There’s only a few people who’ve been in online gaming as long as I have. The plan is to cover all the verticals. Sportsbook is first because it works so naturally with the audience, but we’ve got some exciting opportunities in esports and for sure want to get into casino, bingo and so on. We’re very actively looking at opportunities now.

EGR: What type of things are you looking for in future acquisitions?

DM: We’re looking first at B2C, probably casino, sportsbook or bingo. Anything that will fit with the portfolio. If you look at what we’ve done, we’ve bought a B2B business and a media site. The formula doesn’t really work until we have a B2C site when we can start leveraging the cost advantages of owning our platform. Imagine tomorrow we buy ‘Casino X’, we integrate them onto the Oryx platform, so that becomes a revenue stream for Oryx, a cost-saving to the brand, and a pure margin upside for the group. Plus we get their casino content throughout our platform. If we can shave half a percent of the price we’re paying for content, that’s straight onto the bottom line. It’s ‘free money’ if you like.