Building an Integrated Strategy to Unlock Efficiency with LiveScore

BACKGROUND

Sports Media and Betting company LiveScore Group (LSG) came to us with a challenge: while the performance of their direct response programmatic campaigns for their brands, LiveScore Bet (LSB) and Virgin Bet (VB), looked efficient from a Cost-Per-Action (CPA) perspective, there was no long-term strategic direction or measurement framework in place to understand the effectiveness of these campaigns. This meant that decisions were being made based on short-term media metrics, which didn’t provide any indication of the impact on the bottom line. The business objective was to drive high-quality first-time-deposits (FTDs), efficiently and effectively, but LSG were unable to directly attribute the impact of this activity at a channel level.

Further to this, LSG had limited visibility on the Demand-Side-Platforms (DSPs) being used and there was no testing framework or maturity roadmap in place, which was hindering their ability to gather learnings and make decisions around investment based on data and insight. Beyond this, the brands lacked a clear audience strategy and the performance campaigns were running in complete silo from the brand programmatic activity that Bicycle was already managing. 

 Our proposal focused on shifting the dial across 3 strategic imperatives:

1. Unlock further pockets of efficiency across the activation and make savings for the business through rigorous test & learn.

2. Understand the long-term effectiveness of the channel in driving bottom-line first-time-deposits (FTDs) and use this to empower decisioning.

3. Join up the customer experience across brand and performance touchpoints to nurture people through the journey.

EXECUTION

1. Unlock pockets of efficiency across the campaigns and make savings for the business through rigorous test & learn.

Given the lack of visibility across LSG’s DSP, we kicked off by running an RFI process to find the right DSP for LSG - landing on StackAdapt due to their rich targeting and integration capabilities, which would allow us to rapidly test and learn.

2. Understand the long-term effectiveness of the channel in driving bottom-line FTDs and use this to empower decisioning across our campaigns.

We worked with LSG’s analytics team to build a comprehensive Marketing Mixed Model (MMM) for VB that identified the drivers of the business. The project went further than most MMM analyses as it identified the channels and tactics that were driving profitable customers, which is important for sports bookmakers where lifetime value per customer varies enormously. MMM findings showed programmatic was delivering an incremental profit ROI of £1.28, which was c. 40% higher than the average media channel measured.

3. Join up the customer experience across brand and performance touchpoints to nurture people through the journey.

We designed an integrated maturity roadmap across brand and performance, which was grounded on ensuring that best practice and excellence was at the heart of our brand and performance campaigns to bring them closer together through an integrated strategy. Given our initial performance test with StackAdapt was successful, we scaled this DSP across all programmatic brand activity and identified opportunities to align testing. For LiveScore Bet, we used first-party data to ensure that people from our performance campaigns were not exposed to our brand comms - allowing us to manage wastage. We also leveraged intent signals to prospect people from our brand campaigns into our performance targeting, and move them through the journey. For example, we retargeted people who’d watched >75% of our brand video content with a sequential offer-led direct response ad to create a consistent experience that nudged them to sign up.

RESULTS

1. Increased CPA efficiencies and significant business savings

We drove improved CPA efficiencies since taking over the programmatic activity.

• We also delivered a CPA 63% lower than the target.

• For LiveScore Bet our CPA decredesed by 69%. We also delivered a CPA 62% lower than the target.

• Within 6 months of launching activity, we’d also reduced the audience overlap across the brands from 37% to 25%.

2. A clear view on the effectiveness of the programmatic channel

Our MMM results show that, unlike other high ROI channels, our programmatic strategy is highly effective on the bottom line in driving positive ROI for FTDs. 

3. Positive brand lift on the back of an integrated customer journey

Finally, we saw a positive brand lift during the months when we tested our integrated strategy for LSB (according to our brand YouGov tracking).

• Quarter-on-quarter, we saw increased usage of the brand: 63% of people who considered LSB said they used the platform vs. 50% in the previous quarter when the activity was not live.

• We saw prompted awareness of LSB Bet rise from 17% to 18% MoM, since launching the activity.