GREG KIRKORSKY LAUDS A WINNING TEAM AND CULTURE

GREG KIRKORSKY took up the role of Chief Commercial Officer at SportsDataIO earlier this year. Here, he talks to SBC Leaders about his experience of working in the sports betting space and how his new employer’s solutions, such as its BAKER engine, are helping drive the business to new heights

BY ERIN GALLAGHER

SBC: Can you give us a brief introduction to yourself - how did you come to work at SportsDataIO?

GK: I joined SportsDataIO, as Chief Commercial Officer, Feb 1, 2023. Previously, I spent 25+ years in similar roles at sports data/content companies, STATS LLC and Perform Group Plc, before they merged. Since then, I’ve consulted for a number of companies in the space including Genius Sports, Synergy Sports and Sportz Interactive, based in India. Most recently I was Chief Revenue Officer at SimWin Sports, the first virtual sports league in the Metaverse offering fantasy sports.

I wanted to join SportsDataIO because I really missed working in the traditional sports space. I had grown to know and respect CEO Scott Gimpel and President Dustin Sullivan and admired the impressive business they had built. They are highly respected amongst their peers/partners and from afar I always wondered what it would be like to be a part of their winning team and culture. They are product led and it’s the people that really impresses me the most. With a growing marketplace fueled by the early momentum gained from legal sports wagering in the US, it was the perfect opportunity for me to bring value to the company while continuing to grow personally and professionally in my career.

SBC: So the last time we spoke, we discussed the launch of SportsDataIO’s BAKER Engine. Since then, how has it been received by partners?

GK: It’s been great; we have a number of sportsbooks and fantasy sports partners licensing our BAKER Prediction Engine. It’s really one of one in the space - meaning there isn't another AI data tool drilling down at a discrete play-by-play level, looking at decades of historical sports data and simulating predictive performance and outcomes 10,000 times (at both the micro to macro level). Thus, we are able to provide predictive forecasts that are more accurate, since we have such depth and breadth of underlying data.

For example, more and more sportsbooks are dependent upon simulations to power their betting markets. A few have significantly invested in people and technology to set and price their markets. More will look to capitalize on similar technology and people. We are in the perfect position to partner with them, saving them money and providing a faster and more accurate solution supporting their predictive pricing and trading processes. By trusting and leveraging BAKER we can support them with our predictive analytics complementing their work force and trading operations. determine pre or in-game “tune in” messaging predicting when (or how often) a highlight-worthy play is likely to happen while the game is live. The Predictive BAKER Engine will continue to supply nuggets for storytelling and short form insights and graphics appealing to the diehard sports fan, as well as the casual observer, bringing them closer to the athletes/game as a fan.

SportsDataIO will continue to evolve BAKER’s visualisation outputs through APIs and widgets, sharing short form insights, analytics and social publishing tools. These products will increase the time users/fans spend on site, extend fantasy/sports sign ups/participation. Both provide for increased eyeballs and traffic supporting advertising growth and higher sponsorship dollars.

SBC: Outside of sports betting, what applications does BAKER Engine have for other retailers?

GK: SportsDataIO will stay committed and focused on the sports vertical. We see new opportunities across sports media supporting ad sponsored campaigns. Examples include predicting performance “milestones” or “commemorative moments” that no one anticipated happening. BAKER can

Another use case is ticketing for live sporting events. Ticket service providers have an important job of setting ticket prices for every game. BAKER can determine and prioritize the right data/ criteria to help define and optimise pricing by team and market. The criteria may include probability of how well their team might do, how close the game might be, how likely is their team to make the playoffs, etc. These providers need future game simulations and projections to support their businesses and typically don’t have access to the depth of data, nor the data scientists to produce these insights.

SBC: The Super Bowl was not too long ago, and was held in a state with legalized sports betting for the first time. From your perspective, was there a change in demand for play-by-play data and visualisation widgets in the run-up to the event?

GK: We typically sell Super Bowl content as part of our NFL regular season/postseason offerings.

That type of sale is usually six months in advance of the start of a sports’ regular season. For the NFL we are selling now for the September, 2023 NFL start. Saying that, we did entertain a few endemic brand specific campaigns for the Super Bowl that were dependent upon our in-progress data - timestamping statistical milestones initiating data triggered advertising, while the game was broadcast live.

We also offered up the BAKER Predictive Engine and shared our five “Best Bets” for the big game and highlighted the probability of winning each Super Bowl Square (home/ away scores). The latter gave fans an understanding of how likely they were to win at the end of each quarter/ final score based on the history of the Super Bowl “scores”. This showed off the power of BAKER and was not only a current offering, but served as a dynamic content to support our sales efforts heading into MLB and the Women’s World Cup 2023.

SBC: How important has in-play, granular data been in engaging bettors ahead of, during and after large-scale events such as the Super Bowl?

GK: In-play wagering, specifically micro-betting, is continuing to be at the forefront of our discussions with operators and sportsbooks. The granularity of our data, discrete data points at the play-by-play level, is very important for sportsbooks to handicap, price and settle bets across their in-game markets. The speed for which we capture this data and deliver to operators, via socket connections or other delivery protocol(s), offer sportsbooks an opportunity to increase their volume of bets during a live game. The more wagers they take, the higher their handle and earnings. It’s a volumebased business!

While the big global one-off sporting events are great, the larger and more lucrative opportunity allows for all of these in-play bets during an entire league’s season, to attract a larger audience, over a longer period of games/time and create a much larger betting window throughout a season.

SBC: What can we expect from SportsDataIO for the remainder of 2023?

GK: The sports betting marketplace will continue to attract much of ours and our clients’ attention. Thus, we will continue to expand our pre-match solutions, add markets across our aggregated odds service(s) and provide latency-dependent data delivery solutions to support in-running and micro betting.

SportsDataIO will continue to apply the BAKER Predictive Engine across new sports. We are launching MLB this month and will have added college football, college basketball and the NHL for Fall 23’. In addition, we are expanding our data coverage across golf, tennis and will continue to add to our international soccer coverage, which is important as we add more partners across EMEA, APAC, Central and South America(s).

Lastly, in Q4, 2022, we announced an exclusive distribution partnership with NBC Sports' Rotoworld to bring an instant integrated best-in-class Data-plus-News feed to market. We are excited about having access to Rotoworld’s Player News and now a full calendar year to market and distribute this content to our partners. •