FanDuel TV’s SVP Says Change Is ‘Necessary’ to Grow
In Kevin Grigsby’s 20-year plus career, he’s navigated through a lot of change — whether its the moment to moment of live television producing or leading the corporate rebranding of Betfair’s TVG network to FanDuel TV.
“Changing TVG to FanDuel TV was challenging for all of us. We were asked to create new content from nothing. We took on that change and launched two original studio shows from scratch in a matter of just a couple weeks,” he told TheWrap for this week’s Office With a View.
“But equally as hard was the decision to pivot the brand from TVG,” he continued.I worked for TVG for a long time. I met my wife at TVG, my kids have always known TVG as the only company their dad has worked for. I’m one of the most influential people to have built the TVG brand. Yet, I still made the difficult decision to change because I could see how much growth opportunity there was to rebrand the network and attach ourselves to an amazing brand like FanDuel.”
He noted that he personally spent “a great deal of time assuring all involved that the rebrand was a good thing.”
“We persisted and kept with our plan. Now, just one year since the rebrand to FanDuel TV, we are seeing the success only FanDuel could have brought us,” he added. “So while change can be difficult both personally and professionally, given how the media space is ever-changing, sometimes change is necessary to grow.”
FanDuel TV has aired over 3,000 hours of live sports. In addition to live horse racing, the linear and digital network is expanding its offerings with MMA, international basketball, soccer, pickleball and table tennis. In addition to its own platform, FanDuel TV is available across services including YouTube TV, DirecTV Stream and Hulu, where its viewership is up 31% year over year, and plans to launch multiple FAST channels in the future.
What advice would you give for people looking to break into the industry?
So the advice I personally would give someone trying to break into the gambling content industry is that winning is infectious. If you can help the people that are consuming your content win, that is infectious and that makes it fun and that makes you engaging and that is what garners you more followers and viewership.
You have to be purposeful with how you deliver your message. It’s a little bit of awareness and it’s a lot of having fun. At the same time, it’s trying to give people something that isn’t readily available. If you can provide some type of quantitative information that isn’t readily available, that gives people a perceived edge in their head and that gets them to make those jumps and if you can do that on a consistent basis, you’re going to be a winner in the space.
How has the industry changed since you started in your career?
For 20 years, it was just horse racing for me, and the business metrics attached to the horse racing business that we have were quite aligned with the customer. When we package up horse racing and put it in front of people, we want them to win, because if a customer bets and wins then they bet more, and we make more.
What has changed drastically over the last half dozen years is that people’s attention spans have gotten shorter, they want things more so in a concentrated packaged up, quick, consumable way. Instead of having viewers come to us, we need to be hunters and go to where our viewers and customers are, which means you need to package up content and send it to them where they are on the devices that they consume content on. That’s been the biggest seismic shift in the last five, six, seven years, maybe even longer.
As more states legalize sports betting, what’s the opportunity for FanDuel TV?
For the addressable markets that we do have, we want to serve those customers from a retention standpoint. Make them aware of what they can bet on, help them make bigger bets, more bets, properly push responsible gaming initiatives to them, if indeed, they do need help. That’s very important to us, and a very big initiative for us.
Additionally, in these markets in which sports betting is legal, there are customers that we don’t have and we want to be able to get their attention, whether they haven’t made the first jump into sports betting ever, or they happen to be customers of our competitors. The reality is we want to use our content to engage the people in the states that we could do business.
For other states that have not quite yet come online, we do want to push our brand into those states. We want people to think about our brands from a sports perspective, from a sports betting perspective, from a gaming perspective. So when their market becomes available, we’re top of mind for them.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity
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