Care to take a punt on the mobile future?

This week saw the inaugural mobile gambling summit, organised by your intrepid Telemedia360 team and the lovely people at iGaming Business and what a triumph. A whole day of thought provoking presentations, intense questioning and a palpable air of learning at the Kings Fund in Mayfair.

As opening keynote speaker Dr Windsor Holden, principle analyst at Juniper Research suggested, there have been a number of false dawns with mobile and gambling, but the iPhone and subsequent smartphone penetration that we see today makes it highly likely that mgambling is going to boom this year.

“The JRA in Japan and the huge boom in mobile gambling in China are set to make mobile gambling commonplace in 2011,” Dr Holden told delegates. “And UK gamblers are already voting with their thumbs and playing gambling games. Brands have to sit up and take note of this.”

Backing this up, Darren Mark Noyce, founder and MD of mobile tracking company SKOPOS, told the conference that consumers are already expressing a hunger for mobile gambling products, with 24% of those surveyed by SKOPOS saying that they were ‘accepting of’ m-gambling. While this means that three quarters aren’t, it indicates that a very sizeable chunk of the market – around 15million mobile phone users in the UK alone – are keen.

“And this number is growing,” says Noyce. “We are already starting to see that more people are interested in mobile gambling in the first six months of 2011 than they were at the end of 2010. We expect our next set of data for the end of 2011 to show that this percentage of acceptors of mobile gambling will have risen.”

Dr Holden also suggested that in many people’s minds ‘mobile gambling’ means casino games, slots and sports bets, while a huge number of people – more than half the population – would be happy to play the lottery on mobile and not consider it gambling.

SKOPOS went on to point out the demographics of the consumers that do gamble on mobile as being 70%, 50% 16 to 30 years old, and 71% fully employed. “These are typical smartphone users and comfortably off,” Noyce said. “They are also the same demographic that uses social media extensively and are not typically people who use betting shops.”

Talk at the show’s after party, however, centred very much on how to use mobile more adaptably to try and cover as many people who want to gamble as possible, looking at how to use apps and mobile web for high end casual gamers, simple text  based services to cater to the other end of the gambling community. “After all,” as one anonymous source said, “poor people who don’t have iPhones gamble to get rich so they can afford iPhones”, showing that the gambling and telemedia industries have to work together to look at how to fully exploit all facets of mobile technology to deliver mobile gambling products and to mobilise existing online and bricks and mortar gambling offerings.

The interesting thing is that, as with many other sectors – such as retail, travel, banking, payments to name just a few – the gambling industry (both online and bricks and mortar based) knows it needs to use mobile. The issue is how. The general perception of people walking through the doors at the summit was that “we probably need to learn how to build an app or m-website”, but I hope that by the end of the day they were all thinking much more holistically than that.

Mobile in gambling, retail, travel, payments or any other vertical market isn’t an end in itself, but rather part of the whole. Gambling companies should just think about how they can directly mobilise what they do, rather look at how they can use mobile in its many forms to make what they already do better.

It makes perfect sense for an online slots company to build a lovely looking iPad app that delivers the beans on screen for slots players. It is also great that sports betting companies are looking at how to use mobile to take live bets. But that is just a very small part of what mobile offers the world.

For instance, a betting shop on the high street of Rotherham is not going to be full of people with iPhones and iPads. Its typical clientel don’t fit into that demographic at all, and nor do they want to (even if they win big, they probably won’t become Apple Heads). But that doesn’t mean that there is nothing mobile can bring to that group of people. They will all have mobile phones and so you need to look at how you can use what those phones can do to get those gamers more engaged with you and spending more money.

And the key, as with all things mobile I believe, is text. While those of us in the industry look to all the advanced stuff we can do with our phones, most people out there in the real world know how to use text and, more importantly, can afford to use text. So suddenly the mobile becomes not the gambling tool (or retail tool or payment tool), but a piece of marketing and communications collateral.

This serves to get mobile established as a something non-mobile savvy gamblers and consumers will trust and with this ground work done, you can then develop more mobile-based versions of what you do.

But again, this needn’t be anything more sophisticated than text services if you don’t need or want it to be. Look at The International Sports Betting Company, who spoke at the event in London. Its business is centred around Latin America and Africa and it uses just text to get people betting on sports matches. It is simple, effective and easy to use. It also has the added advantage that it gets black market cash into the official money system, but that’s another story.

What I am trying to say is that simple may be the way forward with all this. Let’s revisit text and see how we can reapply it to services to engage consumers in all channels and give brands in whatever market they operate in a simple and easy way to start on the mobile telemedia journey and then build on that.