Marathonbet head of marketing joins Andreas Bardun at Malta sports betting start-up
Michael Rasmussen joins Sliema-based Mobilt with plans to launch first brand in August
Marathonbet’s former head of marketing Michael Rasmussen has left his role at the Brighton-based bookmaker to take up the new role of CMO at Mobilt – the sports betting start-up led by Andrea Bardun.
Rasmussen started his new role last week, and will lead the marketing of Mobilt’s first brand, KTO.
KTO is expected to go live in August on an EveryMatrix platform, with Mobilt planning to completely redesign the front-end with a focus on mobile UX.
“Andreas and I share the same vision about the future of sports betting,” Rasmussen told EGR. “I feel punter’s pain with some of the stuff our big competitors offer.
“The key for us is ease-of-use. I don’t want to say we’re going back to basics, but the focus will be making it very slick and easy to register and deposit.”
KTO will initially target Scandinavia, the UK and Latin America.
Bardun first launched Mobilt back in November last year in partnership with Richard Smith, who previously worked for Betsson Group as head of mobile and held a similar role at bet365.
Bardun said at the time: “We need to prove ourselves by building an app that shows what mobile sportsbetting should really look like, and then the product will speak for itself.
“We want to harness the power of the modern smartphone.”
Rasmussen said he had not taken the decision lightly to leave Marathonbet and move his family from the South Coast of England to Malta, but said he believed in the vision of the company and its private backing.
He said his marketing focus would initially be on affiliates and a “bottom-up” approach rather than the above-the-line marketing enjoyed by Marathonbet, but said the budget would be ramped up next year when the KTO product had been sufficiently developed to stand out from the market.