Alberoni asked Akkari about the main challenges for an eSports brand to integrate with the world of sports betting. The Co-CEO of Furia eSports said that “we have a very important platform with 14 TOP brands worldwide, such as Nike, Unilever and others. In addition, we joined Rivalry, a sports betting company that has provided us with a very interesting experience. We had to be very careful, since the eSports market has different types of games, in different categories and with different targets,” he commented.
According to Akkari, when talking about eSports, “we have to think as if it were an Olympics, with different modalities and all of them important and with different stories. Just as basketball is singularly gigantic all over the world, so are CS:GO and LoL. The benefit of having an eSports organization is that we are connected to several of these categories,” he says.
The great challenge in the area of electronic sports, according to Akkari, was to have defined age groups, since each modality involves audiences of certain ages, as well as different social conditions, since some of them can be played on cell phones while others require computers with more resources. “With that resolved, we started teaching people about betting on eSports and from there, the passion is what sets the tone for our business, with great engagement,” he says.
“The focus of education for the sports betting client is fundamental, we do this at Betmotion and I have been advocating this for over ten years. We have an audience passionate about sports and eSports and nothing like teaching people how to understand the world of betting,” says Alberoni.
According to him, the NBB has this vision and has established itself as one of the most professional sports organizations, which is why Álvaro Cotta asked about how to involve fans in a relatively new entity and in sports betting, also something new in Brazil.
The director of the National Basketball League said that the organization was born with an important characteristic nowadays. “Decisions must have a collective focus, envisioning the growth of basketball as a whole, above one team individually over another. All decisions are made jointly by the clubs and this strengthens the League. It is also important to look at the market. All projects and strategies, not only on time, but also for a longer period, must take into account the fans. They are what make a sporting entity successful and, of course, for the sport itself. We have to bring remarkable experiences to the fans for the business to survive. It is important to attract them to your content in order to attract brands interested in communicating with this community,” he explained.
According to Cotta, “in basketball we have a very varied fan profile and depending on the platform used. As we have already adopted the multiplatform for some years, we have expanded the attraction of the public. Today, we combine open TV with Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, Tweeter etc, also with closed TV. And each conversation is differentiated according to the platform we are talking to our fans,” he commented.
Angelo Alberoni cited a successful case of Betmotion with NBB, “in which we work through lives our partnership, in a model that is very different from what has been done in Brazil and we are getting a good engagement. Interacting with your fan gives you a very important brand reinforcement. We sponsored two NBB matches on Facebook with an absurd level of engagement and a very cool media return and very easy language with the basketball audience.”
Still on engagement, Alberoni said he sees this in eSports and Furia has achieved that, since it is a passionate brand with fans addicted to the team and with an absurd level of product knowledge. “I wanted to understand how the pandemic, with the suspension of traditional events, affected Furia and eSports in general,” asked Betmotion's Country Manager to André Akkari.
Furia's CEO said that “although I have never seen anything as sad as this pandemic, I cannot deny that it has strengthened eSports. This growth is not a cause for celebration, as it would come anyway, but with confinement, this growth happened differently than we imagined,” he said.
According to Akkari, "a study in the United States pointed out that in eight years eSports would surpass traditional sports in terms of audience and engagement, but with the pandemic, this was reduced to five years. For Brazil, the analysis was that it would take ten years and now, it is said in seven years. The reduction of these expectations was due to the lack of traditional sports offerings and people are crazy about the action and started to approach eSports with the perspective of being able to follow other possibilities of competition. Furia, as well as the entire electronic sports market, benefited from this search. Until then, a Furia game had an audience of around 400 thousand people watching on the various platforms, while today it reaches 870 thousand people,” he says.
“With this growth, it was easy to promote the growth of activity, since more online events have emerged, a facility due to the very nature of eSports,” commented Akkari, comparing with the pre-start phase of the NBA: "a dizzying growth for eSports and when the American basketball league came back, it slowed slightly. This gives us the certainty that this heritage will not be lost.”
Álvaro Cotta said that the exchange of experiences between traditional and electronic sports is fantastic. “In the same way that traditional sports have a lot to learn from eSports, we have to identify at this intersection what is possible to achieve together. Many actions are not competing and may allow bringing more entertainment to people who enjoy one or the other activity,” said NBB’s Marketing Director.
According to Alberoni, there was a great demand for eSports during the pandemic and even with the return of traditional sports, it remains great. “According to a study by the international consultancy H2 Gambling Capital, the eSports and betting market will double in terms of revenues in the next five years. So I wanted to understand from André what integrity is like for a team and how is the synergy between betting, games and such a young audience.”
Akkari said that there are big divisions between the various platforms and games. “The first major concern was to define the game in which we were going to make the biggest campaigns and connections, derived from the target of that game. In addition, we create integrity programs internally for players, coaches, managers, etc. There is a set of lectures focused on this and following what happens around the world. We do not connect, for example, with any league or franchise that does not comply with all integrity plans and control planning, screen recording control and games and so on,” he explained.
At the end of the panel, Angelo Alberoni left the message to everyone that sports betting is here to stay “and can go far beyond traditional sports.”
Source: Exclusive GMB
