Playmaker announced today that Jeff Gross is coming on board as an investor and advisor on the company's new project: Playermaker Betting.
Playmaker is a management company with a sports-focused portfolio of clients. The company has a few social media influencers and musicians in its stable. However, the bulk of their business is repping NFL, NBA, and hockey stars.
Playmaker Betting will be working as a kind of propaganda arm for Playmaker, putting out content based around sports betting. As sports betting becomes more popular, the potential money for gambling-relatied sponsorship deals rises too. Having a platform to promote their clients in that space makes good business sense.
Playmaker Betting is clearly planning to go broad in its approaches to generating clicks, views, and engagement.
"We see the future of sports betting content being short-form, snackable video, and audio content. As well as two-way, conversational, live experiences. From events to SMS to streaming and everything in between," Brandon Harris, Playmaker CEO, explains.
Jeff Gross will not only be an investor in Playmaker Betting. He will also be creating content in collaboration with the new platform. So far the announcements of exactly what these collaborations will be have been vague. What we know so far is that Playmaker Betting will be working with Gross on his podcast and on a Youtube series tracking his experience at this year's WSOP. That is, assuming the WSOP runs in 2021.
Gross measurements
"We are thrilled to bring on Jeff Gross as not only an investor but an advisor as well," the company's CCO, David Woodley said. "Jeff has already provided us several valuable alignments with his existing network and portfolio and will be announcing those partnerships later this month."
"We will create content and experiences that are fun, engaging, and informative first, and which naturally introduce sports betting into the conversation," Harris added.
Gross's Youtube channel has 44.5k followers, and he is active across a range of other social media. This is something that Playmaker Betting is anxious to exploit.
Gross added his weight to the discussion, explaining how he came to be a part of the Playmaker family.
"Playmaker was a perfect fit," Gross said of the investment opportunity. "One of my close friends, Phil Hellmuth, introduced me to the guys. We have some cool things coming up for the World Series of Poker."
Hellmuth is no stranger to the investment-cum-branding game. He is the face of numerous brands and has a piece of several of them.
Gross feels that investments like this are a smart way to take advantage of the United States' changing attitude to gambling in general and sports betting in particular.
"The sports industry is growing so quickly. Betting is becoming less taboo and legalized at a federal level. Poker is coming back online in many states. People are gonna do it anyway. You want to show them good value spots."
"Just do it responsibly," he adds.
Featured image source: Flickr by WPT
