The Only Constant in iGaming Is the Next Vertical

The Big Picture

In Jeff Laniado’s years at Optimove, he's watched the center of gravity in gaming shift more than once. When he started, the business was almost entirely real money gaming: the Caesars, BetMGMs and others of the world running licensed sports and casino. For his first years, that's what nearly every conversation was about. 

The last few years have been a different story. As Jeff put it, you can almost feel each year's theme by walking the floor at the big industry events. A couple of Global Gaming Expos (G2E) ago, it was sweepstakes; ninety percent of the operators at the Optimove booth had something to say about sweeps. Recently, it's prediction markets. With players like Kalshi and Polymarket in the mix and the major sportsbooks moving in, the category is impossible to ignore. 

There's a pattern in that, and it's the useful part: there's always a trend sitting behind the current one, waiting for its turn. Daily fantasy sports loomed, then had its moment. Sweeps loomed, then flooded in. Prediction markets loomed, and now they're everywhere. For operators, the takeaway isn't "chase what's hot." It's "watch what's looming." 

So, what's looming next? One of Jeff's candidates is mystery boxes. It isn't a household name yet, but the mechanic is familiar, from Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) skins to Pop Mart's blind-box phenomenon, and it's now edging toward real money in a form that doesn't fit the categories regulators have built. It's still in the background, partly because prediction markets are stealing the spotlight and partly because no major brand has claimed it. But that can change fast. The moment an incumbent pivots in, a vertical can go from looming to omnipresent overnight. 

The real lesson isn't which vertical wins. The map redraws itself every eighteen months, and no operator can build a durable business by guessing right each time. What they can control is whether the tools they depend on evolve with the market instead of anchoring them to the version that existed when they signed on. 

That's how Optimove approaches its roadmap. Because the platform sits in the middle of the industry, across real money, sweeps, daily fantasy sports, and whatever comes next, the things operators care about are the things we build toward. Sweepstakes is the proof. Optimove leaned in early, and today the platform supports dozens of sweeps operators across the US and globally, at a scale that became something clients can act on: benchmark reporting. A sweeps operator can log in and see their lifetime value, average purchase, and retention rate measured against the average US sweeps casino, instead of guessing in a vacuum about whether a number is good. 

Adapting isn't only about data, though. It's about speed. When a category breaks out, the operators who capture it are the ones who can launch and adjust in the moment, not the ones waiting on handoffs between data, creative, and analytics. And where marketers manage and execute that work is changing: sometimes in a customer relationship marketing platform, sometimes in an AI surface like ChatGPT or Claude, sometimes a AI-customized solution. Operators are working across all of them. This is the power of Positionless Marketing: it gives marketers the freedom to be anything and do everything, so a small team can move at the speed of the player rather than the speed of its slowest handoff. In a fast-moving vertical, that adaptability is what separates riding a trend from missing it. 

In Summary

iGaming's hot vertical will keep changing, from real money to sweeps to prediction markets to whatever comes next. Operators can't win by predicting which one breaks out. They win by building on a platform that adapts as the market does, one that turns each new vertical into a data advantage and lets a lean team move fast enough to capture the moment. Optimove has done exactly that through multiple shifts already, and Positionless Marketing is what keeps its clients moving at the speed the industry now demands. 

To learn more about Optimove and its Positionless Marketing platform, contact us for a demo.
 
To learn more insights from Jeff Laniado, read our post on Insights on AI Creating vs. Decisioning and watch the podcast below.