Is Penn Getting Its Money's Worth From The ESPN Deal?
Is Penn Getting Its Money's Worth From The ESPN Deal?
I am very interested — some might say obsessed — with Penn Entertainment and ESPN’s performance in sports betting. Guilty as charged. ESPN is the biggest brand in American sports that’s not a team, a league, an athlete or footwear, so it’s a pretty major ongoing story that it’s in gambling.
That also makes it worth granularly dissecting what is going on with ESPN Bet. It’s arguably a make-or-break month (or several months) for the online sportsbook after Penn booted Barstool and started paying Disney $150 million annually for the ESPN brand and its marketing.
This week, there’s some evidence that ESPN and Penn don’t have a ton of buy-in from a couple of high-profile personalities on social media — at least outside of official ESPN channels.
First up is Stephen A. Smith, the biggest of all the ESPN personalities (other than maybe Pat McAfee). Leading up to the NFL season, Smith is promoting PrizePicks almost nonstop (a fantasy parlay app, not a sportsbook!) on social media and his personal podcast, and not doing much with ESPN Bet:
We did at least get an ESPN Bet tweet promoting their new TV commercial:
Anyway, that’s Stephen A., who is his own brand outside of ESPN and free to do what he wants outside of company time, although he gets paid a lot of money by them as well. So it’s at least kind of strange that we get constant PrizePicks slips and no tickets from ESPN Bet.
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Perhaps the stranger example is Erin Dolan, a sports betting analyst who works for ESPN and appears on ESPN Bet Live. She gave out some picks on social media ahead of Thursday’s NFL opener. People pointed out (me included) that many of the picks she gave out were not available on ESPN Bet, which certainly seems pretty odd when ESPN is her employer.
She later clarified that they were just bets she liked, regardless of sportsbook, and she can give whatever picks she wants via her social media. She also gave out the picks on SportsCenter and said they were available on ESPN Bet at the end of the segment, when they weren’t. (Of note, quarterback interceptions, over/under first quarter receiving yards and rushing attempts props markets she gave out don’t appear for any games at ESPN Bet.)
But let’s start here, and I am gonna yell this: THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT TIME IN THE SHORT HISTORY OF ESPN BET OTHER THAN LAUNCH DAY.
The days leading up to the start of the NFL season are the most crucial time in customer acquisition for sportsbooks. This opportunity comes once a year; it’s optimal to do everything you can to sign people up or reactivate them. At sportsbooks and at companies that are part of the sports betting ecosystem, it’s critical that everyone pulls in the same direction. What we got was a shrug of the shoulders in terms of supporting ESPN Bet’s efforts at a key point from some key people. You can listen to similar thoughts on buy-in and execution around ESPN Bet at the most recent Legal Sports Report podcast.
Perhaps I am overreacting; it’s been known to happen. But to me, these examples are likely indicative of how much buy-in there is in pushing the ESPN Bet product forward by ESPN, and how (in)effective Penn is at leveraging the brand and its personalities. We’ve been told over the past year that there is strong motivation and buy-in to make this work.
But we have the biggest star on ESPN more interested in pushing an external partnership for money than ESPN Bet. And we have Dolan, who is one of the faces of ESPN Bet, saying it’s not that important to her whether the picks she is offering are at ESPN Bet. (There were dozens and perhaps upwards of a hundred markets available — I didn’t count them all — on the Chiefs-Ravens game at ESPN Bet.) Is it really so much to ask that Dolan and Smith put out a same-game parlay with a bet slip from ESPN Bet with a link to sign up?
It all reeks of Penn perhaps not knowing exactly what it was signing up for when it sold Barstool for a dollar and pivoted to ESPN. Say what you will about Barstool and its time with Penn, but their personalities told people to go bet at Barstool Sportsbook until they were blue in the face.
Over the summer, ESPN Bet has been trending more like the fifth or sixth sportsbook operator rather than a serious challenger for No. 3 behind FanDuel and DraftKings, a starting point few people foresaw heading into football season. That includes me, an infamous pessimist on the partnership. ESPN Bet can still turn it around, but such a turnaround takes more effort and buy-in than we have seen.
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