We are going to introduce the market with the feature that's called the Sports Calendar and the extensive sports API that will show user interest, importance, and the impact of every lead, every match, or every UFC player across every country in the world we do track, so it will give an option to market agencies and even bookmakers by themselves to track a lot of things, proactively, betting on many, many events that are of the interest within the specific market and doing those reactions as quickly as they can. You're listening to 15-minute mastery, a show that empowers you with insights from leading iGaming experts to enhance your personal or business performance. The show is brought to you by the EI-powered Data Analytics Platform Blask and supported by Ted Driven Affiliate and Media Company already media. Lola stars the leading casino partnership program in the next.io, two worlds iGaming community. Hey everyone and welcome to 15-minute mastery. We've got Max Tezla, CEO and co-founder of Blask. A competitive market research tool powered by AI. Max is one of the world's best experts in the market research in technology, automation, and recently AI. We're here with Max to discuss the competitive intelligence. We're here to discuss market research and how you can use it to make a business better and make more money eventually. This is why we're here to figure out what is our gaming all about and how to make more money. So Max, let's kick off with a very first topic. I think this is one of the most unique topics we can uncover here together. It's a market research in general. I think market research in AI gaming has been hidden. It's been outdated for a while and it feels like you guys are rebuilding the whole approach towards market research. I think previously it's been post-active in a way where you can just see what happened and try to adjust further on. I think one of the cool things you were talking about recently is a proactive market analysis and market research. So can you talk a little bit more about it, like why it's important and how this can be done? In a digital era, when most of the businesses are like bloody red oceans, analytics is really important and crucial to build a good strategy and to build a great path. I believe that strategy is the path between the A-point and the B-point. When you draw a line between the two points, this actual line is a strategy. The line can be curvy. What you can do as a business owner, at a C-level executive, as a middle manager, is to understand that you have to work a lot to know the possible outcomes of the path you are going and understanding all the obstacles on it. That's where the proactive approach comes in. You are not just reacting at the events that happened. Imagine just like you're a sports book company. You got the hype of the Indian Premier League as you're operating in India and you don't actually understand what the driver behind the growth. The driver is like the league itself and like when you react at this, you cannot be 100% sure that you can replicate the success you got in future because the league will repeat. But if you'll do the active research and plan your strategy a lot of steps ahead, then you'll be able not just to replicate that success, but also you can strive and nurture the competitive analysis, the market analysis, culture within your company that will allow you to find and forecast lots of obstacles you can find on your path. And that's what our major companies are aiming for right now, going to find utilities, building analytics departments, harnessing the power of artificial intelligence of computer vision to be more in control, not to be like on a treadmill where you have to run a lot to just stay in a single place, but to actually go to the top of the ladder to stand the market, stay competitive and be in the lead. This is actually very interesting approach because I think most of the industry operates on the post analysis, right? You've done something, you receive a PDF from somewhere from someone, you study the PDF and then you try to understand what actually happened. I really like what you're saying, but the question is, what kind of user personas or kind of companies can benefit from this proactive market research and market analysis? Well, a lot. Let's start from the very top. Let's start from strategy, very strategy, very tactics. In terms of the strategy, the leaders behind the company, the board of directors, the C-level, the CEO, like Chief Marketing Officer, Chief Brand Officer, they are in the position to build the culture around the company, where proactive analytics are not a reaction to what was in the past. Although I'm saying that what was in the past is really important to understand the future, because with the power of artificial intelligence, looking at the trends, looking at patterns, you can actually predict and forecast the way future will behave and the market will behave. And there is nothing bad in getting a PDF of a research that is dated for a previous quarter, but it is also a great opportunity. What can make you a market leader is reacting quickly on the change and be agile, to have the set of utilities, of processes, of people around that will be capable of predicting as many possible scenarios and outcomes that will bring you an option to build the inside machine, acting really quickly, just within your in-house marketing department, data analytics department, wherever. So the thing is that if you are not just operating on the huge granularity level of timeframes, trying to predict took waters ahead based on the results of took waters before, but if you are able to actually understand the way that the market oscillates tactically on a much shorter timeframes and when having the toolkit of utilities and the amount of knowledge that will make you be capable of making decisions, agreeing on something, signing partnerships, ambassadorships, looking for new marketing sources, looking for new affiliates, reacting at sport events, as faster as you can so that you as a leader can test a lot of hypothesis in the limited time frame, being incapable of testing a lot and having much more chance and much more luck in getting success in a single path of a hypothesis that actually worked. So like you just have to enrich the funnel of the hypothesis you testing through the market cycle, like beat a month probably, wake water, and with market intelligence that can be as fast as it can, that can be as real time as possible, you can actually do this to enrich the amount of luck to bring your success on the path you are going to. You know, a lot of people including myself, underestimated the power of proactive and kind of predictions in the market research. So I was wondering, like, who are the companies who can benefit the most? That's a good question, but it's kind of fast because there are unlimited opportunities in terms of, like, harnessing this technology, this approach, this culture, being an operator and affiliate platform provider, like a payment service, wherever, like, marketing agency. Even if you are a marketing agency working with operators, yeah, just on a specific step of the ladder of the pyramid. And you have to understand that their possibilities are like, well, if you are working with 10 operators, each of them operating in different countries, and all of those operators are sports booking, you have to react a lot, helping them to be best at their marketing attempts at the specific market by tracking user interests over specific leagues, over specific sports. On some markets, there are a lot of nuances and specifics that are relevant to just those markets, and it's not just a matter of comparing the Champions League to the Indian Premier League, because there can be local leaders in terms of, like, sport clubs, special events, and that's where BLAST comes in. Like, we are going to introduce the market with the feature that's called the Sports Calendar and the extensive sports API that will show user interest, importance, and the impact of every league, every match, where every UFC fight across every country in the world will do track, which will give an option to marketing agencies and even bookmakers by themselves to track a lot of things proactively, betting on many, many events that are of the interest within the specific market and doing those reactions as quickly as they can. What do you think are the most unique discoveries you've seen so far? If you're an operator, you're operating in B2C, and if you're operating in B2C, you'll probably have lots and lots of users, like millions of them, tens of millions of them, and with technology, with computers, algorithms, artificial intelligence, you can discover a lot about user preferences there. Let's start just from games. I have to know which games to feature on your lobby, on a specific market, because if you're in Brazil and you're not featuring the Fortune Tiger, probably right now, the moment we do record this podcast, you're missing out a lot. It's like, well, there are markets where it gives off Olympus dominance a lot, but to understand what to feature, you can to go to B2B specific media with articles, by companies, by journalists reporting that, well, in that one, that week, those games were really popular among players in this specific market. But what can you do more? Actually, imagine you have a system that is capable of tracking the change of the position of every single game, of every single competitor in their lobbies, in a specific market, the country market, with a day-over-day granularity. That will be a super power to you to understand all of the local micro trends around, and if it will be combined with a chart of the user interest across the market for the specific game provider, I think if you're operating from the middle management to the top-level position in the casino, well, that will be a life-changer to you, a game-changer, because you'll be able to understand all of the micro trends to utilize them, to probably get the most out of, well, PPC traffic, the ASO traffic from affiliates, like the recent integration with the most famous influencer there. And that's it. And in terms of influencers, well, I can speak infinitely about this. Imagine you have an option, just like Coca-Cola, track the appearance of the logos of competitors on T-shirts of just as many influencers your country have, the market you are in. Like, worldwide, you can do this with computer vision. It's just the sort of commodity right now, because I've read lots of free searches where computer vision can actually take a look at lots of pictures and videos from social networks and that love those by specific companies. And companies are paying a lot for all of those researchers. Like, research agencies have their own AI, ML department, computer vision, like PhD, diploma, guys working there, selling the product for just millions of dollars for those three searches. That's like all the product and gamble and companies like this from the automotive industry, like Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz. I keep all of this. But if you're a micro brand-new, and like probably no one will work with you, especially if you're on the offshore market, because you're unregulated. And imagine having a tool, a utility that will do this for you almost instantly, that updates day over day, and you can see all of those charts showcasing is spreading the mast on the visual influencer channel over many niches, like Pete, adult, being just general entertainment. Let's play some video gaming, wherever. And there was just two use cases of proactive research, culture, that can bring you really, really, really lots of value. Well, you know, like I remember my days on building this market research strategies and spending days or even weeks, understanding the markets, understanding, like as you said, market standards, games, patterns, you know, products and their like specifics. I think you're talking about some really cool stuff, which will be eventually saving, you know, like years combined for all the industry people on the market research, on especially building the market research strategy and making sure that your product and your company is localized towards the market standards. I mean, this is really cool. You know, you mentioned technology, which is helping you kind of, you know, understand these patterns better. So can you talk a little bit more about it? I know that you guys are using AI and it seems like AI is becoming like a buzzword these days, but I'm really curious, like whether, you know, AI has a real use case in the market research and job products specifically. Let me tell you a brief story about how we built that automated brand discovery system. Like, you know, when last you do have countries with a track, you can just click on a country, go to the country overview and see the list of, like, the majority of brands present on the country market. Imagine you have a data department struggling a lot day over day trying to find all of the newcomer brands, theater, casino operators, sports, sports book operator coming to that market. Trying to understand those operators actually work there. It's not just if you are using, like, search engine result page from Google that it's not just well, you are going to discover Mozambique. It's, like, Portuguese speaking country and you have a brand that's really good and SEO and it's mainly Portuguese. But you can see that the brand does not operate there, but it's still there on the search engine result page and you have to do decisions quickly. And you have to provide your customers with really up-to-date information to the current moment. And so that's why we have created two state-of-the-art artificial intelligence products, like neural networks. The first one is the computer vision that is capable to classify websites based on, like, general information websites, like Wikipedia, Twitter, or whatever, a casino operator, a sports book operator, or the iGaming affiliate website. And that's just the beginning of how the technology is being used in the price layout research department and, like, all of this. Automation comes not just to classify those websites sorted then and give an option to make human supervisors around to make their decisions because we don't idealize artificial intelligence. We utilize artificial intelligence to be a supportive hand, a supportive shoulder to the human being at the other side of the screen that is capable of making more and more decisions with the help of those algorithms that they've just do. The prep filtering, the sorting of all of this information, giving them straight to the face, like, the most relevant resources that are highly likely to be added to the specific country market overview page. And by using another part of artificial intelligence, that's not the vision, but when we're multimodal, we're going to natural language processing, we can access the information of those websites from practically every country of the world speaking lots of languages because the large language model understands a lot. And we cannot just classify it based on these two modalities output. But I also use this data to later on get the relevant information about the promotional bonus offers on those websites, like utilizing computer vision, tracking the change of the position of games, detecting the specific games and plotting them with the game operator is actually involved in the development of this game. Like, well, we can understand that that's a game by like micro gaming, map, play, whatever. And they're just a small advancement for us to do the market discovery, creating lots and lots of ideas to how, furtherly, on develop the system and evolve the system. Like computer vision can be utilized not just to track games and classify websites, be it the casino or not. It can be used for multiple purposes. Imagine, like, there is a huge match, like real Madrid will be playing games to Milan. And you are going to the Instagram of Kiran Babaya, two hours prior to the match. You identify that he snapped a story of himself being angry and their artificial intelligence and detect his facial expression, his emotion, and provide this information to you classified like in three ways, be it like positive, negative, or neutral. And it will be a really good information for teams that are involved in trading, in setting up odds. And besides computer vision, if we are talking about like the natural language processing, like text segmentation, it's all about like social listening, listening to influencers, listening to media outlets, border renowned experts in Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, odds of articles that can pass through the system providing you with many, many more insights in seconds in a couple of clicks that can take years to analyze for even a human or an algorithm. But, well, that's the use case for AI. Well, you know, like listening to your answer, I was immediately going through like, you know, hundreds of use cases where either operator or affiliate or like a game provider can utilize the tools and the analogies you just mentioned in order to be able to, you know, uncover new business opportunities. And, you know, I was always saying that I gaming is quite outdated with technology and, you know, we were always like trying to, you know, go up to speed with, you know, let's say e-commerce, fintech, you know, other like more technology savvy industries. And now I feel like finally we've almost arrived to the same speed. So I think it was a great conversation, Max. Thanks a lot for sharing your thoughts and insights on the market research. I think, you know, you guys are doing a great job and I'm happy to be together on this journey with you. So thank you so much and I hope everyone else will enjoy this as much as I did. Thanks a lot, Max. Bye-bye. Thank you, thank you. Thank you. [music] [ Silence ]
