Interview: Sky's the limit - part two

The second part of eGR Mobile Intelligence’s exclusive interview with Sky Betting & Gaming director of products Conor Grant

Part one of eGR Mobile Intelligence’s interview with Conor Grant can be read here.

eMI: How important is it to have single sign-on now?

CG: We know the value of a sportsbook-only customer and we know the value of a sportsbook customer that plays casino as well. Getting customers to cross-sell is going to be one of the biggest challenges with the smaller device size. You have to very clever in how you target the customers to try and cross-sell into gaming, that’s a key pinch point in that journey.

eMI: And did that shape your decision to partner with Playtech for Sky Casino at all?

CG: That wasn’t a motivating factor really, I think we were really motivated by the fact we spent a number of months researching our Sky Vegas proposition and tried to refresh that. During that process we spotted an opportunity in the market to grow our offer to online casino customers by offering them a second casino experience, and Sky Casino was borne as a result of the way Sky Vegas was perceived to be seen as more slots orientated and not necessarily a more traditional casino experience. We’ve created Sky Casino as a more serious, professional casino experience, where the proposition is more classic and more personal, and exactly the kind of experience you’d expect from Sky.

eMI: Is it important to have different brands alongside each other in the app store?

CG: I wouldn’t necessarily advocate having different brands just for the sake of it. We spent a lot of time understanding why certain customer segments weren’t using our existing products, and as a result of that we found a commercial opportunity for us to take advantage of. The App Store’s an important distribution channel, but I’m not sure it’s important to have different brands in there to cater for people who might be more organically trawling through the App Store

eMI: Is there any risk of cannibalisation between the two brands in the app store?

CG: There’s a risk, but we believe that in Sky Vegas and Sky Casino we’ve created two very distinct propositions and we can mitigate that risk by managing the customer experience through our marketing promotions. It’s also important to have a data-driven insight approach, and that’ll help us to mitigate any cannibalisation by directing our customer’s based on their needs to the right gaming vertical.

eMI: Is having more than one app per vertical a real step change that you’ve seen?

CG: I understand both sides of the debate, and you can understand why someone might build a football-only app to make that a more engaging, content-driven experience, but it’s very much how you want to prevent your business. In my opinion having separate apps makes the job of cross-selling more difficult. It’s very early in the lifecycle of mobile – it’s still an immature market – to be deciding one way or another. We haven’t seen any demand from our customers for apps done in this way, so at this point in time we think we’re on the right track.

eMI: Poker seems to be an unloved vertical at the moment, what’s Sky Bet’s take on it?

CG: With Sky Poker we’ve got a very different, distinct and unique offer, certainly in comparison to some of our UK sportsbook competitors. In the main, our competitors are on a shared network whereas we have our own. As a mobile-first company we knew we had to address the fact that we were desktop only on Poker. Rather than being mobile or tablet we actually transitioned from the old flash client to fully responsive HTML5, and we’re now device agnostic. That’s what we wanted to do, to build a product that utilises the same software across all devices. Tablet makes for a much greater entry point than mobile for poker.