A fan is at the local sports bar watching the game. The bartender asks whether to add another drink to the tab or not. The fans wallet is feeling a little empty, just a few dollars to spare. But the fan has a hunch what the outcome of the next play will be and wishes to place a bet on it…
The scene just described is a likely and typical one among sports bars across the country. The propensity of such a scenario surely rises during a hotly contested game, or after a few rounds of drinks, of course. There’s a natural symbiotic relationship that manifests itself daily within this setting. And the proliferation of second-screen mediums have only enhanced this experience more.
Appropriately, “Spogo was born from ‘sports on the go’; and derives from our love of sports and understanding that fan behavior is changing. Second-screen usage is booming but, in many cases, it has become a distraction. With Spogo, we set to build a platform that would engage fans with the games they watch, and not distract them,” Andrew Vassallo, Spogo’s Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, explained to SportTechie his app’s inception.
Spogo is a simple and inveterate by nature app that allows users to earn redeemable points based off correct live-game predictions. Questions range from “Who will win?” to “What color Gatorade is dumped on the coach’s head at the end of the game?”, which users can promptly place free wagers on them throughout the game one’s watching. The amassed virtual points can then be presented at the bar or restaurant for discounted beer, food, and several other items depending on the establishment. This model ensures an environment where fans are engaged and rewarded during games while providing awareness, traffic, and revenue to these businesses that wouldn’t be available otherwise.
The experience is made possible due to the technological functionality and overall tone of the content. Questions are streamlined to the app through live gamemasters–not automatically ran by an algorithm or a computerized system, but by people–that create and publish the content for the sporting events presented to fans to interact with. Spogo does, in fact, have “a personality of its own”, which caters to users in a non-intrusive way. The characteristics showcased are quite similar to that of one’s own real, bar buddy. It’s very casually conversational by nature and user-friendly.
“The idea is not to distract the fan from the game, but rather enhance their experience by asking questions at appropriate times. We’ve found very early on in our launch period that running simultaneous games is actually a good thing. Casual fans have more events from which to choose; and avid fans can switch back and forth between games, really immersing themselves in the live Spogo experience,” Vassallo described how questions are distributed.
To this point, the amount of questions allocated to a specific game varies depending on the sport. On average, 20-50 questions are prompted to a game’s interface. Sports like football and baseball that have plenty of downtime would have more questions than basketball and hockey. The goal is to provide fans with enough engaging wagers so they can potentially win during lapses in game play that don’t interfere with the action at hand. This way users’ tendency to participate are consistent and align to an adequate second-screen flow.
Vassallo detailed the wager system’s framework: “Because Spogo is free, and there is no monetary risk for the user, our odds need to be close, but not perfect. For standard predictions like ‘Who will win?’ and ‘Over/Under’, we’ll use the lines from Vegas. But for real-time predictions, our gamemasters publish odds based on their their sports acumen. We never want Spogo to be so difficult to earn points that users get frustrated and stop playing. If users win too many points–that’s OK. We want them to use them to unlock and redeem rewards from our partners. But, we set the odds appropriately so that the game is fun for all types of players.”
The ability to bet, after all, is the primary driver behind Spogo. These predictions are incentivized to the various parties involved. The fan earns redeemable points for discounted or free food and beer on the spot. The bar or restaurant capitalizes from increased traffic and more frequent orders due to fans staying longer. Even brands and networks benefit through in-app advertising and ratings, respectively. By the wager system being friendly, fun, and easy to use, the value proposition proves to be viable since the experience is additive–at times addicting, too–and receptive to the degrees of fandom that exist.
Concurrently, the predictive gaming element within the sports sector is at a ripe spot at this point in time. Back in the early 2000s, Vassallo mentioned that there were just a handful of web-based sports properties dedicated to live-gaming gamification. The marketplace clearly wasn’t mature enough to be in a position where the experience truly crossed over to fans. The advent of social media and mobile’s adoption rate over the past few years have created an opportunity and expedited the need for it.
Just a few months ago, TechCrunch reported that PrePlay, a competitor app in the space, raised $4.7 million in funding to increase its user base of 100,000, which already counts Miami Dolphins’ Owner, Matt Higgins, as an investor and claims partnerships with MLB, CBS Sports, and the NHL to boot. The NBA, too, features their own with the State Farm-sponsored NBA Challenge, which was first introduced this past season inside NBA Game Time and then NBA All-Star 2013 App. And Turner Sports’ Vice President of Emerging Media, Peter Scott, has stated it’s the “future of sports television.”
Spogo has witnessed this trend first hand. When the app was in beta for three months of last year’s NFL season, their users unlocked over 1,000 rewards from the 50 sports bars they’ve partnered with. These metrics from this sample size have only helped their case when presenting to other prospective partners. The level of engagement leans towards their being proclivity among users.
“There were several key learnings, but two in particular that stood out: our users tried an average of three new sports bars they had never visited before because of Spogo. And, for those users who were playing Spogo at the bar, they stayed more than an entire half of football longer than they used to just to keep playing,” said Vassallo.
Accordingly, Adweek noted a study that ESPN’s viewers considerably over-index to attending sports bars by the average user being 37 percent more likely to check one out. The results from this study took place last month out of nearly 10,500 sample-sized, smartphone users. This information further supports Spogo’s big data gathering that ranges from prediction metrics to reward redemption behavior. All of which is valuable to partners and to grow their own platform going forward.
While Spogo is currently available to be activated at Northeast cities of Boston, New York, and Providence, the potential is there for them to expand to other regions of the country as well as to be a part of the in-venue experience, as the latter has been chronicled throughout SportTechie’s #NFLTechSeries.
Spogo just might be the sports bar buddy one can’t be without.
Want to bet?