On the opening morning of SBC Summit Lisbon 2026, Bloomreach hosted Top Deck, an invite-only rooftop breakfast for iGaming leaders.
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Chris Conroy, Chief Data & Product Officer at Future Anthem, joined Adam Browne, iGaming Industry Lead at Bloomreach, for a session on real-time personalisation across channels. The room brought together operators, platform representatives and independent specialists, several of whom added their own experience to the discussion.
Early in the session, Chris put a question to the room: would you say you’re running a personalised operation today? The question set the tone for a candid conversation about what is holding the industry back, and what good looks like.
This article summarises the key themes from that discussion.
Personalisation starts with joined-up data and teams
Chris set out the structural reasons personalisation remains difficult in gambling. He described a typical operator setup: a sportsbook from one supplier and a casino from another, with 20 direct integrations to game suppliers and an aggregator for the tail of games, before adding further products. With that “agglomeration of integrations”, it is difficult to have all your data joined up.
The industry has also tended to focus on the next product feature, from bet builders to exchange betting, with each innovation quickly copied by competitors. The backend data work has received less attention, and as Chris put it, “you cannot personalise without sorting out the backend.”
Adam added that the operators making the most progress are organising their teams around the player. Chris agreed. The ability to do these things already exists, and the gap is often culture:
"It's not because people are resisting it. It's just because teams, exactly as you say, have not yet been organised in that way."
One player should be treated as one person
Chris shared an example from his own inbox: two emails from a tier-one European brand, one about casino and one about sports, arriving within 30 seconds of each other. Flagged separately in each vertical, he was being treated as two different customers. “They’re talking to me like I’m two different people.”
Those emails, he explained, are what siloed teams look like from the customer’s side. A sports team owns the sports customer, a casino team owns the casino customer, and “nobody is thinking about the actual customer.”
The operators getting this right, Chris argued, join up what a player sees in the app and on site with what reaches their inbox, down to the same recommended bets. A few people in the room, he noted, are already doing this well. “You really want to make your inbox like the app these days.”
Chris applied the same thinking to responsible gambling. A message encouraging a player to consider responsibility tools has a different objective, and in his view it belongs in the same single player journey:
"It's a different message, but it should be the same player journey as part of the same flow, using the same tone of voice."
Interacting with players in the moments that matter
For Chris, personalisation works at the individual level across three areas: the content players see, the bonuses and offers they receive, and how operators communicate with them off site.
Content is where sport stands apart. On a typical Saturday, a typical sportsbook offers around 100,000 unique events, changing every second, and a player sees perhaps five of them when they log in. When Chris described this at a recent Databricks conference, the reaction was that it sounded more like building a recommendation engine for the stock market than for e-commerce. Casino moves more slowly, and its biggest challenge is game metadata.
On bonuses, Chris noted that most are still dictated by “a campaign that runs on a Monday”. In most other industries, “the experience you get is dictated by what you do in the actual app.”
Off site, the industry has traditionally communicated most with players it thinks have already churned. Chris argued that personalisation should be about what is interesting to the player, in the moment it happens: a jackpot reaching a certain level, or a goal in a match they already have a bet on. When Mbappé scores, “that’s the window that you have.”
This, he said, is what the big tech brands do well:
"They understand the moments that people care about, and they communicate in that moment."
For Chris, that is the point of real time. It is “not about the engineers getting all excited about how many milliseconds you can shave away”, but about moments like the final of Wimbledon. In his words, “It’s about the World Cup. It’s about all these moments.”
The scale of that opportunity in sport was clear during this summer’s World Cup, as we explored in Record World Cup Numbers Prove Real Time is Now.
Event-led marketing, with control at the point of send
Chris described a paradigm shift “from a campaign-led world” of Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday sends “to an event-led world where we want to respond to events.” Campaigns still have a place. Even a scheduled activity, such as a message one hour before every Premier League game, now works as a trigger, and the relevant players are identified at the point of send.
Adam described what this makes possible. Responding to a moment the player already cares about gives operators “a lot more shots at goal”, without needing to hand away bonus or margin. The more intent a moment carries, the higher it should sit in the hierarchy.
With so many triggers running, how is the volume each player receives managed? Chris’s answer is to let the algorithms surface every relevant opportunity, and handle “air traffic control” at platform level. Adam explained how Bloomreach builds this in layers, with compliance as the baseline and priority set by business logic, all in the same place the journey is orchestrated.
Chris highlighted Bloomreach’s ability to manage communication frequency at individual player level: a player who plays every day should have a higher propensity to receive communication than one who plays once a month. Teams can then send as many player signals as they like, with control as close to the point of communication as possible.
"What you're saying is, 'This is a relevant recommendation for this player at this time,' but you've got some different controls that are going to decide whether they actually get it or not. And that's how it should be."
From the room: data, measurement and bonus efficiency
The audience brought practitioner experience to the discussion. One attendee pointed out that personalisation also means knowing “when it shouldn’t be triggered”, when a message might disrupt a player’s pattern of behaviour.
An operator named data foundations as the first obstacle, followed by knowing where to focus. A campaign might lift turnover on a certain game without adding much value in NGR. Measurement was the third challenge, which Chris described as “the hardest problem in marketing.” The more personalisation an operator runs, the harder each individual initiative becomes to isolate. The most reliable measure, he said, is “the overall”: the combined effect of all personalisation activity, measured against a control. He pointed to how big tech companies such as Spotify and YouTube approach it:
"They just decided at some point that they believe in personalisation, and actually they don't measure personalisation anymore. What they measure is experience X against experience Y."
Another attendee grouped the challenge into three areas: technical plumbing, operational maturity, and bonus budget allocation, arguing that operators ultimately have to solve all three together.
Chris picked up the bonus point. Bonus-to-NGR typically runs at 10–20% overall. At the individual player level, around 70% of bonus budget goes to players whose bonus-to-NGR ratio is above 20%. In his experience, most of the inefficiency comes from promotional mechanics such as “Stake 10, get 10”, where the reward is promised upfront. Real-time mechanics can work differently: for example, rewarding a player after a specific outcome, such as replacing losses with free spins, rather than guaranteeing the bonus in advance. Chris explored bonus efficiency in more depth in our recent Remote Gaming Duty AMA.
Conclusion
The discussion at Top Deck pointed to a clear direction for the industry. Personalisation starts with joined-up data and depends on teams organised around the player. It delivers most value in the moments players care about, across every channel.
With controls applied close to the point of send, operators can surface every relevant signal while managing what each player ultimately receives.
Future Anthem is the real-time AI platform powering personalisation for the global gaming industry. Explore the Content Recommendations, Real-Time Experiences and Dynamic Audiences modules to find out more.
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