Penn Entertainment is shifting gears in the fiercely competitive world of mobile sports betting, replacing its ESPN Bet brand in the US with theScore Bet from its Ontario market.
Improvise, Adapt, Overcome
Penn Entertainment might as well be ripping a page out of the Heartbreak Ridge script when Clint Eastwood, playing an old gunny sergeant, used these famous three words to his new marine recruits—improvise, overcome, adapt.
Penn CEO Jay Snowden has had to rely on that quite a bit since taking his regional land-based casino business into the turbulent mobile sports betting waters, which has cost his company billions without a great deal of success.
The End of the ESPN Bet Partnership
This could be Snowden’s last stand after he bailed out of a 10-year, $2 billion deal with ESPN to form ESPN Bet, a mobile sports betting site that was supposed to leverage the power of the ESPN brand to bring in millions of customers and capture a 20% market share within three years.
ESPN Bet fell well short of that, barely securing 3% of the market after two unsuccessful years, and the parting between the companies was mutual after ESPN found another suitor, DraftKings, with which to partner in the bookmaking business.
The contract between Penn Entertainment and ESPN will terminate on December 1st, and the beginning of a new era for Penn’s theScore Bet brand will begin anew after leaving the US market in 2021 and becoming Penn’s Ontario, Canada, sports betting brand.
Snowden Banking on theScore
Jay Snowden’s strategy going forward is customer retention, as he will attempt to retain his ESPN Bet customers from fleeing the new platform and seeking other alternatives. Furthermore, Snowden will try to cross-sell his mobile sports betting with the company’s successful iGaming presence.
“Looking ahead, we plan to rebrand our [online sports betting] offering in the U.S. to theScore Bet, with a target date of December 1, 2025, to coincide with the expected launch of sports betting in Missouri, subject to regulatory approvals,” Snowden said.
“We currently operate theScore Bet brand in Ontario, and our OSB product across both the U.S. and Canada will now leverage connectivity with the theScore media app, which has approximately 4 million monthly active users across North America. Our OSB offerings will continue to provide a top-of-funnel cross-sell opportunity for our Hollywood-branded iCasino, which will remain integrated into our OSB product offering in states where legal, in addition to serving as a standalone iCasino app,” Snowden added.
Ensuring a Seamless Transition for Users
Unlike in 2023, when Penn ditched the Barstool Sportsbook for ESPN Bet, customers had to download the ESPN Bet app and register. Not a seamless transition, but this time around, the transition will be effortless, according to Snowden.
“Look, [chief technology officer] Aaron [LaBerge] and team have done a great job improving the product and experience, our feature set, our [user interface and user experience], and if you look at retention results this year at the first two months of football season versus last year, significant improvement,” Snowden said. “So, we’re going to be laser-focused on retention of existing users and then also getting some of these Score Media users that maybe currently aren’t using ESPN Bet to use theScore Bet in the US as we move forward.”
