How Your Digital Life Becomes Gambling Marketing Gold

Here’s my question: If TransUnion is doing this for the sports betting industry, can you imagine what it — and others — are doing for the alcohol industry? The apparel industry? The food industry? The car industry? And every other industry under the sun?

By “this” I mean turning how we spend our time and money — basically, our behavior, offline, online, everywhere — into nothing more than 0s and 1s other businesses can use to sell us products.

Now, we kind of know this happens, kind of intuit it, and — mostly — never spend a second thinking about it. But companies like TransUnion probably know us better than we know ourselves, and by “probably” I mean “definitely,” and by “definitely,” I mean -50000.

I started thinking about this topic after Alfonso Straffon — independent analyst, longtime industry observer, former sports trader, and equities analyst at Deutsche Bank — tweeted a screenshot before March Madness tipped off:

In a nutshell, the credit reporting company TransUnion has a few side hustles. One of them is called “TruAudience,” and it helps businesses identify potential customers. During March Madness, TransUnion has been hyping how TruAudience can help sports betting companies identify VIPs. (That whoosh of wind you just heard was Rep. Paul Tonko and the other architects of the SAFE Bet Act violently nodding their heads.)

Before we crack open this nut, know where I’m coming from: I am a vehement anti-Luddite. I love technology. I firmly believe if we can think it, we should do it, and once we do it, we should deal with the consequences — both positive and negative — and move on.

Humans are, by nature, pioneers. Go west young man, I say. Onward and upward. Implant a computer chip in my brain, please.

Now that that’s out of the way … holy shizz. Take this, direct from the TransUnion website concerning TruAudience: “TruAudience ElementOne features more than 20,000 audience profiles — ranging from psychographic and behavioral attributes to attitudes, preferences for gambling, lottery, sports betting and casino, buying patterns, interests, media usage and more. This info helps you make informed decisions based on observed, in-market behavior and target with granularity or at scale.”

I don’t even know what “psychographic” means, never mind that I apparently have thousands of attributes that would be defined as such.

I needed to know more, and as such, got connected with Declan Raines, who heads TransUnion’s gaming business, and Allyson Dietz, who leads marketing for the TruAudience product.

Connecting dots

“What we’re trying to do is improve the customer experience as you navigate to that path to purchase,” Dietz said. “We’ve all been victims of bad shopping experiences, right? Where you buy a pair of shoes, and you get served an ad for those same shoes, and then that ad continues to show up in your feed for the next two or three weeks.”

The solution, according to Dietz, is better data management.

“What we’re trying to do is minimize that experience,” she said. “If we can connect the dots and say that same person is the same person you’re sending an ad to — this email address, this IP address — you can suppress them and stop sending ads to someone who’s already made the purchase.”

I asked Dietz if TransUnion’s credit reporting business fed into their TruAudience product. She was quick to clarify the separation.

“No, actually not,” she said. “We have a little bit of a church-and-state situation where we do not integrate the two together for a lot of obvious reasons, the most important being we’re not allowed to.”

Instead, what they refer to as their marketing identity graph captures two core components.

“It captures offline information about consumers: demographic data, consumer attributes and behaviors that we capture from survey data, the billions of phone numbers, home addresses, things that are kind of basic information about consumers,” Dietz said. “As well as online behaviors. So things like email addresses, device IDs, IP addresses, information that we can help our marketing clients find their consumers out in the ecosystem.”

So, uh … whatcha got on me? 

“I think it’s all stuff you probably know — what sort of places you’ve been on the internet, where you’re spending your time from a consumption and media standpoint,” she said. “Are you a user of X or Facebook? These are things that help marketers ensure they’re showing up in your feed in the right place.”

I asked if there was a way for privacy-conscious consumers to opt out.

“TransUnion has a really robust management of compliance and consumer privacy,” Dietz said. “There are things like GDPR and CCPA. California is the first state to have really enacted privacy regulations, and other states have since picked it up as well. There is no national legislation in the U.S. today, but because most companies operate across the United States, they have to follow CCPA.”

Do we want this?

The company insists consumers actually want this level of personalization.

“We have recently sent out a survey that looks at consumer preferences, and it’s clear consumers are interested in personalized experiences,” she said. “They’re going to have to see advertising. They might as well see an ad they care about as opposed to an ad they don’t care about. What they’re concerned about more is things like fraud and having their identities stolen.”

The more I spoke with Dietz, the more I realized I pretty much agreed with her. I know I want a more personalized online experience. And yeah, a more personalized online gambling experience. Keep those promos coming, you know?

Allan Stone co-founded Acquire.bet, a player acquisition agency that’s been driving targeted traffic to casino, iGaming, and sportsbooks for over 20 years. He frames our relationship with free digital services as an implicit bargain.

“The cat’s out of the bag. Everyone’s giving all their data away because they’ve got a Facebook profile, they’ve got an Instagram profile, they’ve got a TikTok profile, and then all of your financial doings are now via apps, which means that data exists and those companies all share information with each other,” said Stone. “Would you rather have ads that are relevant to you as a customer and what it is you want to engage in, or would you rather have ads that are completely irrelevant? They’re still there. One’s relevant and the other is not.”

You don’t like it? Well, tough (delete your) cookies.

“At the end of the day, it’s like, hey, consumer, you like being able to open your iPhone and open up Facebook and it doesn’t cost you anything, right? Well, OK, the cost is Facebook knows all your likes and interests and they get advertisers to pay them to get access to reach you,” Stone said. “That’s the cost.”

He imagines a different model that never materialized.

“Would it be great if there was some alternative where you as a consumer could opt out of all that data information sharing and just pay for your usage on every one of these free services that you use? Yes, I think that would be great,” said Stone. “Unfortunately, as consumers we were never given the ultimate choice which was: Would you rather pay for it or would you rather get it for free?”

RG and more

When it comes to gambling specifically — and responsible gambling, even more specifically —  Raines said operators have both ethical and commercial incentives to avoid targeting vulnerable players.

“It does not make sense to push a $2,000 free bet to someone who cannot afford to do so,” Raines said. “You have a double whammy there of the brand equity risks at stake, as well as the fact that it is not a very good marketing strategy.”

As for the SAFE Bet Act, which could severely limit this type of marketing in gambling, Raines was diplomatic.

“We adhere to any regulations as they come,” he said. “We comply with CCPA because we’re a massive diverse business spread over the entire United States. When it comes to something like the SAFE Bet Act, it’s an extension of the work that we do already in remaining compliant with applicable state gaming laws. It’s now just a proposed federal overlay.”

Raines suggested that if such legislation passes, they’d simply adapt.

“If something like that gets enacted, it’s really just going to shift the marketing strategies,” he said. “We provide the tools to enable those strategies, so if operators cannot advertise within certain times or within certain channels with certain demographics, our solutions will enable them to do that — the same way we help other sectors apply compliance.”

So much info

Listen, I get it. All this data about us floating around in the ether and being captured like butterflies in a net could certainly give one pause as a regular Mr. Joe C. Onsumer. 

It’s weird/scary/dystopian to consider that while I’ve been living with my wife for 25 years and we still stumble into fights based on misunderstandings, TransUnion (and companies like it) are collecting remarkably detailed information about my habits, selling this information to other businesses, who then use that information to — at their most benign — gently nudge me toward their products and services. They know me, deeply.

Granted, when it comes to things like jeans and breakfast cereal, perhaps this is just the price of modern life. But when it comes to analyzing if I’d make a profitable (read: losing) gambler, well … that does raise some questions worth considering.

It almost — almost! — makes me appreciate the intent behind the SAFE Bet Act’s attempt to keep AI, VIP targeting, and personalized promotions out of gambling. Though this particular genie is so far out of the bottle that he’s left Agrabah and is living in a doorman building on the Upper West Side.

Yes, technology is certainly being leveraged by companies in ways most of us don’t fully comprehend. And it’s not going away.

That’s why it probably falls to people like Alfonso Straffon to highlight these practices, and for people like me to navel gaze about them. We’re not helpless in the face of Big Data, but we may be disadvantaged if we remain unaware of it.

Being oblivious to the mechanics of marketing didn’t much matter pre-computer, pre-internet, pre-AI.

Being oblivious today means the fact that you watch Friends reruns, make over $100,000 a year, you’re married with two kids, buy Doritos (even when they’re not on sale), drive an SUV, eat out twice a week, pay your bills on time, and have a loving yet complicated relationship with your mother may make you a target for Gambling Firm, Inc. with an assist from Marketing Firm, LTD in their quest to find their next high-value customer.

Worth thinking about, at least.