today gaming america is speaking with brad batiste the ceo of tally to hear about the ways in which this company is enhancing the sports betting experience thank you for speaking with us today brad hey cameron and i'm happy to be here fabulous fabulous uh my first question uh is not really about tally it's more about you i'm wondering uh you know what your career has been like and how you arrived at the point which you know sit yeah you know that's an interesting question cameron i uh pretty much everything i've done um in my in my career which is being a variety of different things has been a stepping stone to becoming the ceo at talley originally i'm from canada i when i was in university i had a real interest in sports and advertising and so my first real job out of university was working for a brewery molson breweries and they were a big sports rights holder and uh i spent a bit of time working in that area and i really enjoyed it and after that i i moved into um running and owning promotions agencies um that had a lot of sports related uh clients um including wilson which was was was nice and then um i moved to the u.s to work for razorfish uh which is a very large interactive company to to become their uh mobile lead uh for the west coast and so during that time he started to combine mobile and and sports and sports rights sports marketing started a a mobile consultancy where mastercard became on a global basis became our core client and we did programs for the world cup for for them when they uh still had their world cup rates and then i spent 10 years in sports marketing within an omnicom agency um and so all of those things combined really just set me up to become the head of uh of tally where we do you know mobile sports marketing uh sports betting marketing uh for for you know global clients sure yeah and i wanted to ask um more about tally how would you describe what tally does exactly so on the surface where a fan engagement platform uh we have um fun free to play games that uh that fans engage with where they can predict the score or various uh almost prop bet type opportunities for them to to test their knowledge we have trivia games that type of thing but really what we are is a big data company so we basically provide this free-to-play game and from that the fans tell us a lot about themselves um we have a really interesting tool within the game which is a a poll question that we have about 85 answer rate where we ask all kinds of different types of questions and that really gives us an opportunity to d dig deeply into you know our fans backgrounds and and what they're what they're really all about sure um i wanted to ask more about the data uh the aggregation of data how do you guys go about pulling all this stuff together well you know it's interesting when i took over the platform it was basically a uh kind of a fun game um but um our ceo and cto uh rupert woolsey is is like a pure data scientist and so he's built all of these very interesting components to the platform where we you know we collect the user id and user data uh from you know their email and mobile number we collect uh geographic data um in terms of you know where they're playing from we collect game day uh gameplay data like how often they play uh how many they get right how many to get wrong um so we get a pretty good sense of how good they are at predicting things um we collect behavior data around the time and the frequency and the um the fandom if you will uh the number of games they play the number of teams they have a relationship with the players that they uh align themselves with and then we have custom data points that we collect through that poll question and we can ask all kinds of questions about the fans themselves how old are you where are you playing from what uh uh you know [Music] how many games you watch a year etc we can ask questions about uh their the team you know do you have season tickets do you like you buy merchandise etc or we can ask questions about their sponsors um we can ask questions uh regarding do you like bud light lime for instance yes no and so we we can provide a whole bunch of information for them to work with their sponsorship group to provide significantly more data for them and we've done over 20 million of these uh prediction uh questions and you know two million poll questions so we have a significant amount of data that's a that's a lot of poll questions um i was wondering who who who would you say are the main beneficiaries of this data i think i mean the teams obviously uh teams and uh and other sponsors are are you know the direct beneficiaries of it um i'll give you an example we're working with ambev in south america um and so i'm actually back in the beer business which is kind of fun um and so the we we provide them with information about the the players and they then segment that into uh different segment audience segments and then we have seen that they've been sending out offers a b c d type of testing offers to the community where they've been providing different types of couponing and offer for home beer delivery which was i thought was really interesting and what we've just found out is that we're getting about a 13 to 15 redemption on that and so that's huge i mean that those types of numbers you don't see very often so you can actually see the direct line between someone playing the game and then uh using that data to drive real revenue for them yeah so it serves a real purpose there yeah for sure yeah yeah uh so recently tally raised four million dollars in seed funding if i understand correctly um yeah i was wondering what the process of raising the cash was like uh and what sort of your uh invest an investor profile typical investor profile might look like for a company such as yours yeah so that's a really interesting question um so i took over the the ceo role about two months before adam silver canceled the first nba game prior to the pandemic i remember that yeah and our game relies on live games to work um because you can't you can't predict on you know the past so it's been an interesting you know two and a half years where you have to deal with the fact that your product is contingent upon other product being available like nba games or nhl games or etc and um and so we had to work through the the pandemic and then we uh you know it seems like we're emerging from that and then there's a certain degree of financial uncertainty around the world we're facing you know a lot of issues in europe in terms of uh the you know conflict um so this all boils down to it being a really tough time to raise money and you know we probably sent out 400 pitches we had more than 50 zoom meetings with potential investors probably 10 really serious face-to-face meetings we had merger discussions we had m a discussions and we've had vc discussions and we really have been fortunate to um have the folks from access be our lead investor and and really humbled and and thankful because i think at this point cameron if if there are startups out there that are looking for funds it's probably not going to be happening for the next 12 to 18 months the funding is really hard to come by and uh and so i think the process was tricky but i we're really glad we arrived sure sure um what do you intend on doing with this newly raised cache well when i first hit the account uh cameron i was like well maybe i should just run with it and uh then i was talking to my wife and she said well with the price of airfare and gas these days we're not going to get very far so we should probably just use it for uh for business purposes you know we're going to use it for what you would expect you know um we're going to invest more in the platform um we're going to expand the operations in in south america and we've just uh started you know it's interesting we've been very north american focused but now we're seeing to be finding you know places around the globe to work so we've just aligned with it with new resources in in europe um to help us in europe and the middle east um and then we are in the process of building up new and different types of games including pay-to-play games yeah um and what is this process like uh in terms of expanding to new markets or expanding uh expanding in the u.s as well how do you get the word out i mean from our side it's a pretty small community um you know there's there's you can you can pretty much reach out to most of the people that are key decision makers within you know sports teams and leagues and federations um [Music] you know broadcasters um and and the sports betting organization so it it's not a it's not a media-based uh outreach really it's more of um you know one-to-one we use very senior and seasoned advisors to help us connect directly to senior people within in those organizations and provide you know introduction to to them so you know as a b2b platform you know we rely mainly on those advisors and and you know funnily enough it's a great deal of word of mouth um we get a lot of referrals from other people who say have you tried tally sure sure uh well my last question is the same question i always end with and that is uh where where would you hope to see tally in 18 to 24 months you know i think you know we have a we have a plan um obviously with um all kinds of uh different approaches in an early stage like this i think the key thing for us is to be very open to trial of different approach different avenues um what we have right now is working nicely and it's growing you know quickly um but i i think i'd like to see us in a place where um you know a lot of the teams or leagues and uh and broadcasters have had an opportunity to work with us and get a chance to see our product in action and then i also think that we will be looking at b2c platform opportunities um where we can take our game out to the you know individuals and do something that'll be fun in maybe a new type of pay-to-play environment yeah well i wish you the best of luck with that well i appreciate that thank you very much and thank you for speaking with us this has been brad batisse the ceo of tally thank you you