Breaking into the sports betting industry can be expensive, but Low6 may have found a new, cost effective way in. Co-Founder Jamie Mitchell joined our Becky Liggero Fontana recently to discuss their new cost-effective approach to sports betting marketing, and teased exciting new things they have coming to the American market.
Mitchell began by describing what sets Low6 apart. “Low6 is an influencer-led, B2B white label platform,” he began. “The idea really behind Low6 was to offer franchises, clubs, the opportunity to have a betting platform that was risk-free, so they didn’t have to have a traditional sports book where if somebody gets the correct number on a roulette machine or whatever it might be, that they have to put that prize money up, and also to move away from the sort of harder, stigmatized form of gambling that we’re sort of so used to seeing chastised in the in the media every single day.”
This new approach to sports betting circumvents the traditionally high marketing costs that come with building a brand. “It’s no secret that the sports books have to pay a tremendous amount to acquire new customers to their platforms, and marketing budgets, as a new betting company coming into the market, unless we had tens and tens of millions, we won’t make any impression at all on that traditional space,” he said. “So we looked and said, you know, what can we do to be disruptive? And I know everybody claims to be disruptive but we genuinely think we are. We said look, we’ll give our product to franchises and clubs.”
Low6 already has a great partner Mitchell could point to. “So if we take Sheffield Wednesday who are clients of ours, very active and engaged social media base, how do we interact with them?” he asked.
“Well if on a timeline of Twitter or Facebook, they see a Low6 brand, it means nothing to them, they’ve got no affinity to our brand and it will take us millions of pounds and tens of years to build an affinity. But what they have got is an affinity to their football club, and they’re born into it, most people in the U.K. are born into their football club.”
Even as a new player, Low6 had to contend with the disruption of Covid-19. They tried to make the best of it. “We took some time to sort of sit back and make our systems more robust, the games more fan engagement, so the side of the games has improved, and then we were we were really keen to get sport back and get going again.”
Mitchell spoke about how their target demographic is slightly younger, but also more likely to want more value from a simple bet. With low, simplified betting, that sets them as a perfect deterrent for problem gambling, something Mitchell cares deeply about. “Problem gamblers won’t have a home with sportsbooks fairly soon, and probably rightly so for their own protection,” he said. “When you have the big sportsbooks revenues generating up to 80%, 90% of their revenue from problem gamblers, what’s the alternative to that? We need to look at that as a society and say, we don’t want problem gambling, it is a disease.”
Although we don’t know much about it yet, Mitchell was willing to give us at least an idea of how big their upcoming American expansion will look like. “We’re really excited about our American strategy,” he said. “We’ve got license granted with the U.K. Gambling Commission and the Irish commission as well, our license with Malta is pending. Our American expansion is super exciting to us because we’ve got contracts now that give us a really big land grab across various franchises in the U.S.A, we’ll be talking more about this in the coming weeks but I think people, when they see what we’ve been able to achieve, will be quite excited.”
We won’t have to wait very long to find out more. “We start our American team in December, January, Covid allowing,” Mitchell said. “We’re really looking forward to building a business out in America. Looking forward to announcing some of it shortly.”
Watch the full interview to see Mitchell get into more detail about how their model works, why its attracting a younger audience, and the potential partnerships he imagines will develop. And don’t forget to subscribe to the CalvinAyre.com YouTube channel where we have a bunch of great content coming out soon.
