Guide to GETTING THE MOST FROM YOUR TAB Putting Punters back in Pubs & Clubs
CONTENTS Introduction... 3 Customisation is key... 4 Screen readability matters... 6 Automation saves time and money... 7 Sometimes less is more... 9 Sports punters and the forgotten generation... 10 Conclusion: Better information equals more punters... 13
INTRODUCTION It s no secret, punters all over the country are changing their betting habits through more choice, an evolving market and new technologies. We ve noticed this change too, and the effects it s having on pubs and clubs all over Australia. Flexicast is Australia s leading provider of wagering displays to TAB outlets and licensed venues, and as such have decided to look deeper into the issue to understand what the problems are, and offer some solutions to help keep punters in your venue. We offer an alternative to the standard TAB experience tailored data solutions, reduced staff costs and greater punter retention. We ve used our knowledge and 25 plus years of market experience to provide some ideas on what you can do to keep punters in your venues longer. Put simply it s all about giving your venue a point of difference by customising and automating your betting content so you can save on staff time and costs. After all, punter retention in your pub or club is vital for a better bottom line, but it doesn t have to be hard work to achieve. Read on to find out all about our Guide to Getting the Most from your TAB, and if you have any questions either give us a call on 1800 676 705 or email us at sales@flexicast.com.au. 3
CUSTOMISATION IS KEY Retaining your punters can be difficult without the right tools to create a unique customer experience. Customisation is your greatest weapon in achieving this, and when done right can leave your punters feeling that they can t punt anywhere else. If they have everything they like to use at hand in your venue, and not home and not at the TAB down the road, then you become an invaluable part of their punting habits. And once they find something they love, they ll want to tell others about it too. Let s face it, most TABs look the same so it s important you don t have an identical offering to the venue down the road, almost to the point that the punter feels he can leave your venue and go anywhere for the same experience. Even our standard Flexicast odds screens are starkly different and better than any other option for your TAB, but the options go way beyond just that. There is a whole suite of added screens that have unique information and formats for your venue and your punters to choose an ideal mix to display. 4
For example there are graphic screens such as Seizmo or Graphic Shortener, colourful team oriented sports screens with previous clash information, Exacta and Quinella screens, Ratings, Electronic Form (eform) terminals and many more. There are also options like portrait or landscape orientation for odds screens, and options such as form panels and jockey silks, results panels, and interstate comparison prices that you can turn on or off to customise your offering and glue your punters to your venue for life. There are literally hundreds of different screens and formats to choose from, each with their own tailored options for the punters in your custom TAB. 5
SCREEN READABILITY MATTERS The readability of content on screens can have a profound effect on the effectiveness of your TAB area. While all content should be easily readable at a distance that is suitable to your venue s layout, true readability delivers benefits far beyond this simple metric. Having content with great readability means doing more with less. It means fitting 24 runners on a single screen instead of the punter s pet hate; waiting for the bottom half of the field to scroll around on a big race. It means conserving space by using smaller screens for the same area. It means packing more information into the same screen area such as trend indicators, form or comparison prices from the home state. It means punters sitting comfortably in your venue having a beer and enjoying the punt, not cramming together a metre from the screens because they can t reliably read the prices. Flexicast has invested countless hours on research and product development to improve readability on our screens. Smart scaling stretches or shrinks everything to fit just right no matter how busy the race is and how much is going on. Runner names and jockeys are smart-scaled to the optimal size for best readability no matter what combinations come up. We choose fonts on studies of contrast and readable distance, not on whether it matches a marketing style-guide. We outline, we colour code for quick recognition, we create a science of making every millimetre of screen area work hard for you and your patrons no space is wasted. Readability is our #1 priority but it s the first casualty of standardised offerings that are primarily brand fixated, provide a homogenised look-and-feel or indeed focussed on anything other than the best possible experience for your punters. 6
AUTOMATION SAVES TIME AND MONEY Automation of TAB displays is a Flexicast trademark. Long gone are the days where you weren t able to control your own coverage, remember running out into the public area with a remote control to switch ancient Teletext TVs from the day meets to the twilight meets, and then again for the night meets? TABs are now commonly covering as many as 50 meetings a day and this is growing fast, however licensed venues cannot afford to dedicate enough wall area to hang 50 side-screen TVs with a meeting on each, let alone have to worry about switching dozens of screens from one meeting to another throughout the afternoon or evening. Flexicast has content smart enough for you to set up your venue once and never need to touch it again. We call it true automation by designing content to be smart enough to manage itself, and the key to that is allowing screens to be locked to locations, or groups of locations rather than meetings. 7
With lock to locations a screen can be set to show the next thoroughbred, harness or greyhound event at location M Melbourne. The screen will work all day and night showing whichever race is next to go from MR, MG and MH meetings. This makes a screen three times more efficient, but equally important it will mean the screen does not need altering to go from day coverage to night coverage. You can also lock screens to groups of these locations. If have a location M screen, and S screen and a B screen and, then a few group screens such as (in Tabcorp grouping); locations A,W,C & P all on one screen; Y,T,L,E & J on another and the rest on a third, this will give you complete coverage of all day and night meets in just six screens. And it will do that day-in day-out without staff intervention. If you have a bigger TAB area, use more single locations and smaller groups and configure it to anything from four side-screens to 25, all of them automatic. Automation saves staff time. The job of a TAB manager is greatly simplified and no daily decisions about what to cover where, are made again. Staff can spend more time pulling beers or serving food. In fact, add EBTs and a few eform form terminals to replace the need for printed form, and your TAB staff time can be slashed while retaining full TAB coverage and promoting the best turnover outcomes possible. To be really pro-active with having a great TAB, another automation feature is the ability to lay your TAB out and then save the configuration to a profile in our simple-to-use control system, that you can then load again with a single click of a mouse or finger-press on a tablet. You might have a special layout for Friday nights that cover Sydney trots and dogs with dedicated screens or one that press-gangs some of your odds screens into sport screens, when major sports events are on, or the Melbourne Cup on every second screen. Just save your layout, change it to what you want and then save that and you can switch back and forward as often as you like. You can even log in from home or do it from a tablet while standing in the middle of your public TAB area. These are just some of the features that will add a high level of automation to your TAB and slash staff time while improving the user experience. 8
SOMETIMES LESS IS MORE A significant and increasing trend is that punters are drifting from traditional TAB punting to online offerings. This is exacerbated by wagering providers that insist on making that transition simple by trying to make the in-venue experience seamlessly joined to the online experience. That s code for migrating your patrons away to online offerings they can bet on from home or in another location. While we think it s vital to create a point of difference to keep punters in your venue, some venues have declining TAB interest and want to utilise some of the allocated space for other revenues. With Flexicast it is possible to reduce your space while improving the customer experience, through fewer screens, less wall space, less floor space yet complete coverage and maintaining a great point of difference that will keep punters in your venue longer. In automation we explained how our unique Lock-to-Location feature works to automate a TAB, but this same feature is also the key tool in downsizing your TAB area. Lock-to-Locations allow you to maintain full coverage while reducing your side-screens (the ones where you might have just Melbourne races covered) to as few as three or four screens. Another great feature is two and four-way splits. These allow you to condense two or four screens down to a single screen split two or four ways. Utilising four-ways, we even work with venues that run the entire TAB on just two big screens. Our staff work with yours to assess the best way of delivering the best possible coverage with the screens you have, no matter how small you want your TAB area to be, and all the while automating your TAB for the lowest possible cost. 9
SPORTS PUNTERS AND THE FORGOTTEN GENERATION No two punters are the same, and we recognise that. In fact while there are a number of issues in the market with a changing demographic and new technologies, there are two types of punters you need to be very aware of and address their needs. 1. Attracting Sports Bettors The numbers really do tell the story, the popularity of sports betting in Australia is exploding: Turnover has doubled in the past five years It now accounts for $4 billion in revenue annually Sports betting is growing twice as fast as horse racing 10
Attracting sport punters to your venue is a unique challenge. Most homes have at least one large flat screen TV, and with mobile betting apps, is in direct competition for venues. Having live odds up side-by-side with live sporting vision is a great way to enhance the entertainment value. How many bets are not placed because of punters wrongly assuming the odds and not bothering to check? Having them displayed consistently through a match maximises the possibility of bets being placed in your venue. And when the match is over and punters start thinking about the next match, key statistical information displayed on your screen, often overlooked by recreational punters, can also stimulate the minds and wallets of sport punters. Flexicast have developed many sporting odds products to give your customers what they want attractive and engaging sports wagering data in an accessible format. Flexicast Listen, also allows punters to enjoy the audio from any of your screens combining Wi-Fi and the punter s smart phone. There s now no need to make the tough choice on Friday night of what to dedicate the audio to in your venue. 2. Over 45s The Forgotten Generation In the rush to cater to a younger smart phone toting generation, the over 45s, a key long-term punting demographic, appear to be collateral damage. Online betting has been the driver in a changing TAB landscape in recent times. Paper wall sheets are fading into obscurity, and wagering providers seem hell bent on homogenizing their online and retail experience. This homogenizing is taking away the TAB manager s opportunity to tailor their TAB to their particular customer base as well as drastically reducing their ability to stand apart from the TAB down the road. This change in direction has come at the expense of the betting experience for many of the over 45s. These bread-and-butter punters are often not tech savvy, not to mention resistant to change. 11
Telling these punters they ll need to get their form from a smart phone or website is leading to a disgruntled generation of punters who are starting to look elsewhere. They don t rely on technology like younger generations. Having a punt is more of a social experience, they don t bet from home, they love the whole ritual of going to the pub and putting on bets. Flexicast venues have the older generation covered. We have designed our eform product to be almost identical to paper form, to make it a simple and unintimidating transition. Our Locked-to-Location odds screens now optionally feature runner-by-runner form information so they can still get the key form stats they need without relying on touch devices. In fact many venues with Flexicast attract both types of punters, sports and the over 45s, due to the customisable point of difference provided through our range of products. 12
CONCLUSION: BETTER INFORMATION EQUALS MORE PUNTERS People are more reliant on better and easier-to-access information to make informed decisions, and it s no different in TABs. With so much competition in the market and a changing technological landscape, staying ahead means staying on top. And while customisation is key to providing a point of difference for your punters, it can easily be handled through a range of Flexicast products. We re continually expanding our product range and developing our technologies for application wherever demand for live data and digital data displays is growing. This means we keep an eye on what developments are happening in the market and produce industry-leading solutions to best deal with them. Time and time again it comes back to better information provided in the best possible format. Give that to your punters and they ll keep coming back. If you d like to know more about our thoughts on providing a great TAB experience, either us a call on 1800 676 705 or email us at sales@flexicast.com.au. 13
Change the game in your venue and contact Flexicast on 1800 676 705 or visit www.flexicast.com to find out more.