SBC Summit opened in Lisbon today with Michael Jordan on stage.
That is quite a sentence for what is, technically, still a gambling industry conference.
Jordan appeared on the Super Stage alongside Sportradar founder Carsten Koerl and DraftKings co-founder Jason Robins, talking about leadership, sport, technology, media and the business around fan engagement. It was a strong opening, obviously, and it also summed up rather nicely what SBC has become.
This is no longer a room full of bookmakers talking to platform providers.
It is enormous.
Around 40,000 people are expected this week, with roughly 800 exhibitors and sponsors spread across FIL and the MEO Arena. Sports betting, casino, payments, affiliates, media, data, compliance, marketing, technology, AI, more AI, and then some companies that seem to do all of those things at once.
After a few hours walking around, you start wondering whether there are still any businesses left in Europe that aren’t exhibiting here.
There probably are. They are presumably running the bars.
What struck me most today wasn’t really the size on its own. We’ve all been to big exhibitions.
It was the breadth of the thing.
Twenty years ago, you walked into a gaming show and had a pretty good idea who everybody was. Operators operated. Suppliers supplied. Payment companies moved money. Consultants wandered around looking thoughtful.
Now the lines are much less clear.
One company is offering CRM, payments, AI, acquisition tools, analytics and player protection from the same stand.
Another appears to have invented a revolutionary new way of saying “platform”.
And almost everything is now AI-powered.
Naturally.
There must be a warehouse somewhere containing all the perfectly functional products that were simply “data-driven” last year.
This is not to say the AI story is nonsense. Far from it. There is a lot happening around customer service, fraud, personalisation, CRM, responsible gaming, analytics and content. Some of it will materially change how operators work.
Some of it appears to have had the letters A and I added to the brochure sometime in August.
That is one of the things I want to look at more closely tomorrow.
Forget the slogans for a minute.
What is actually new?
What solves a real operator problem?
What makes money, saves money, protects money or makes the customer experience noticeably better?
And what simply looks very good on a six-metre LED wall?
Those are rather different categories.
The other obvious change is how comfortable the industry has become with spectacle.
Michael Jordan in the afternoon.
The Script tonight.
Tiësto at the closing event on Thursday.
This is quite a long way from a hotel conference room, a lukewarm buffet and somebody from compliance explaining new reporting requirements at 8.30 in the morning.
The Script will headline tonight’s opening party at Pavilhão Carlos Lopes, with around 3,000 delegates expected. Thursday finishes with Tiësto, Blasterjaxx and Marc Vedo at the MEO Arena.
You can call that entertainment.
You can also call it networking with better production values.
Anyone who has spent enough time around gaming exhibitions knows perfectly well that the useful conversations rarely obey the official programme.
A lot of business gets done standing next to coffee machines, outside entrances, over dinner, or at an hour when nobody should be discussing contract terms.
SBC has simply formalised the whole thing.
Conference by day, concert by night, repeat until Friday.
There is probably an app somewhere calculating your remaining social battery.
The celebrity names also say something else.
Gaming has moved much closer to the wider sports, media and entertainment business.
The Jordan session was not really about gambling in the narrow sense. It was about sport as a commercial ecosystem: media, technology, data, audience, sponsorship, betting, content and fan engagement.
That is exactly where the industry now sits.
Betting used to orbit sport.
Increasingly, it is part of the same commercial machinery.
The same is true on the technology side. Payments are no longer just a cashier function. CRM is not just email. Affiliates are media businesses. Media businesses are acquisition channels. Data companies influence product decisions. Regulators influence product design. Technology suppliers increasingly touch half the customer journey.
Everything has become connected.
Usually through an API.
The global mix is also hard to miss.
Latin America has a huge presence. Africa is getting more attention. North America is still reshaping itself around regulated sports betting. Asia remains enormous, fragmented and complicated. Eastern Europe and Central Asia are far more visible than they once were.
That matters because some of the more interesting ideas often come from markets where operators had to solve awkward problems.
Different payment behaviour.
Different regulation.
Different customer economics.
Different devices.
Different infrastructure.
A company operating in a mature Western European market can sometimes afford to improve things slowly.
A company trying to make a business work in a more difficult environment usually cannot.
Necessity remains a very efficient product-development department.
And then there are the 40,000 delegates.
It is an impressive number, although I am not entirely sure anybody has worked out whether having 40,000 people in one place makes networking easier or merely increases the number of people you fail to meet.
Probably both.
But the number does tell us something.
There is an enormous amount of money, talent, technology and competition gathered in Lisbon this week, all trying to solve variations of the same basic problems.
Find customers.
Convert them.
Keep them.
Understand them.
Protect them.
Get paid.
Stay compliant.
Do it more efficiently than the next operator.
That is the business underneath all the lights.
The stands get bigger every year. The screens get brighter. The language gets more ambitious. Every product now seems capable of “transforming the player journey”.
The poor player must be exhausted.
Still, somewhere inside all of this are ideas that will actually matter.
That is what I am interested in.
Michael Jordan was the obvious headline today.
The Script will get theirs tonight.
Tomorrow I will spend more time looking at the less glamorous part of SBC: what people are actually selling, what looks genuinely useful, what is genuinely new, and what should perhaps have remained a PowerPoint presentation.
With 800 exhibitors, the odds are good that we will find something.
https://sbcevents.com/sbc-summit/event-schedule/
