The 2021 edition of SPORTEL took the main players, brands and decision makers from the media, broadcast rights, content and sports technology market to Monaco, France.
After the suspension of the main event of the sports business industry last year due to the pandemic, the conference was once again held in style and providing opportunities for the connection of the segment in person still in 2021.
iGaming Brazil was the only representative of the betting and gaming sector in Brazil to make a wide coverage every day of SPORTEL with images of the main events, special information and exclusive interviews. Thus, the portal exclusively interviewed Sportradar’s Global Marketing Head, Adam Azor.
Azor is an integrated professional with global experience in top brands such as Coca Cola, Chevrolet, Diageo, Microsoft, Molson Coors, Mondelez, Heineken, LinkedIn, InBev, Orange, Cineworld, Virgin Media, Vue Cinemas, Eaton Power and Sony.
While Sportradar is a leading global sports technology company that creates immersive experiences for sports fans and punters.
Sportradar’s involvement with the eSports segment
Currently, the company is turning its attention to an industry that is experiencing unprecedented growth, electronic sports. “eSports is a really exciting growth area and one of the categories we support. So, to describe how we work with eSports, let me talk a little bit about how it fits into our group,” declared Sportradar’s Global Head of Marketing.
Azor added: “Let’s start with our sports entertainment side of the business, which is very much built around fan engagement. So that’s all where fans and spectators will consume the sport via broadcast or OTT, but also the engagement products around. Whether it’s second-screen interaction or just genuine insights into the activity, you’ll also have the content and streaming that fits into sports entertainment. So people’s ability to see the real games, watch the tournaments and watch the content yourself.”
Boom in the eSports betting market
If electronic sports are on the rise, therefore, bets in this competitive segment are also evolving and have a very relevant differential in Adam Azor’s vision.
“We are now going to our side of bets and games. This is also very interesting. Therefore, we work with data that is pre-game, but also live. So the live data at play, eSports is quite unique because all the data is digital. First of all, it’s coming directly from the action, unlike all other sports, which are our traditional sports, whose data has to be captured. There’s a lot of data coming in and then we need to translate it into usable data for the betting industry,” he quoted.
The executive also detailed the support offered to bookmakers and companies aiming to boost eSports as an interesting betting product. “Betting services, such as dice, odds and also trading. That’s why we work for several bookmakers and companies in this space to be able to leverage eSports as a betting product. In addition, we also have flows that combine this package. The same that we do on the sports entertainment side,” said Azor.
And he added: “Finally, what’s really interesting is that these two areas really combine in a distant area, what we do, which is around our integrity services and what that’s actually is monitoring our own eSports matches”.
Sportradar’s work to ensure the integrity of events
The interviewee also revealed the existence of official partnerships of the company within the electronic games market. “And we have official partnerships, which are like Riot. And we actually look at the eSports games themselves,” adding that “if there’s any irregularity with betting patterns or regular dice points, we know instantly.”
After all, Sportradar is recognized worldwide for its monitoring work aimed at the integrity of events. “We work with these federations to educate them that there is a regularity and then we will support them with case work. Very recently, we launched something called UDS, which is basically our free service to any rights holder, and we’re basically going to provide them with the infrastructure technology to monitor the health of any eSports tournament.”
Adam Azor also took the opportunity to project the development of the eSports market after this pandemic period. “We are ingrained in eSports, we have been in the last almost two years with the pandemic, we have seen a big change and many eSports are growing potentially due to their robustness within the pandemic. Therefore, it will be very interesting to see how the entrance of new audiences will continue to increase. And I think we’re going to see greater sophistication and shorter response time to help people navigate these waters, wherever they operate,” he concluded.