And now, the bull case for Penn Entertainment and its soon-to-be-rebranded online sportsbook, which shifts from ESPN Bet to theScore Bet, alongside its Hollywood Casino app.
That’s correct. The bull case.
Yes, I know the ESPN Bet thing was clearly a failure. Sure, the Barstool Sportsbook thing, that was a failure as well. Right, these big, huge, billion-dollar media partnership swings and misses will undoubtedly be held up as “what not to do” in MBA programs for centuries. But still: I do think there’s a bull case to be made here. It takes a little squinting and hopium, but it’s there.
For starters — as I screamed from the rooftops a few months ago — the ESPN Bet app, along with the Hollywood Casino app, are objectively awesome for the average bettor. Clean interface, super fast response time, lightning fast withdrawals, and, at the time of the writing, great promos.
I’m in New Jersey. I have 20-plus options for OSB and iCasino, and I touch on them all every day in my promotional crawl for dollars. So I know the ins, outs, pros, and cons of each operator. Penn’s stuff is top-notch.
Once Dec. 1 rolls around, ESPN Bet goes to the grave, replaced by theScore Bet, which Penn bought, along with theScore, a few years back for $2 billion. (Rolls eyes, let’s just move on.) Well, based on Penn’s earnings call last week, and from the mouths of CEO Jay Snowden and Aaron LaBerge, the company’s chief technology officer, there’s actually an argument — compelling or not, you decide — that bettors will be better off than before.
The $150 million question
Let’s start with the obvious: Penn was paying ESPN $150 million annually for brand licensing and advertising partnerships. That money is about to become available for, well, literally anything else. And while the company isn’t coming out and promising to shower users with cash, the math here isn’t complicated.
“All the marketing spend that we dropped to our operating model from the ESPN deal is now going to be able to be applied in a very precise fashion, targeting states [where we have iCasino or OSB],” LaBerge said on the call. “So we feel like we have a lot more control and precision from a marketing perspective, and it’s been working already.”
Translation: Instead of dumping truckloads of money into a national ESPN partnership that required broad, expensive marketing plays, Penn can now target specific states, specific users, and specific products with that same budget. More precision, less waste, and theoretically more generous offers for the people actually using the app.
Penn in full control
Penn finally owns everything. No more splitting decisions with Dave Portnoy. No more navigating Disney’s corporate bureaucracy. No more outside partnerships dictating strategy.
“Between theScore Media, theScore Bet, and Hollywood Casino, these are brands that we own and we control everything about how those operate,” LaBerge said. “So we’re pretty optimistic about moving forward.”
Snowden was even more direct about the advantage this gives them: “We have the ability to target and personalize from a marketing and CRM perspective today that we just didn’t have even a year ago. We have a full marketing plan, and we are going to be ready to go. If some do not respond initially, there are going to be bounce-back follow-up offers.”
This is the part where I remind you that despite the brand chaos and partnership failures, the underlying technology platform Penn built is legitimately solid. And it will remain the same. When theScore Bet launches on Dec. 1, users won’t need to download anything new, won’t need to re-register, won’t need to jump through any hoops. Only the icon and logo change.
This is critical because Penn learned some hard lessons from the Barstool-to-ESPN transition, which was a technological nightmare.
“We put our customers through a lot of hoops to jump through and we had a new technology stack. We were down for several days. We asked them to come back in and reregister and redeposit,” Snowden said. “There was a lot going on that created noise in addition to the brand change.”
This time? None of that. You wake up, your app icon looks different, you open it, everything works the same way, you move on with your life.
App not new
Another overlooked element of this transition is that theScore isn’t some made-up brand Penn is launching out of thin air. Its app has been a fixture in mobile sports media for nearly two decades, particularly in Canada, where it’s embedded in the sports culture.
In Ontario, theScore Bet is already operational and performing well. This isn’t a “let’s see if this works” experiment. It’s a proven entity in at least one market, and now Penn gets to expand it to the U.S. with all the infrastructure, technology, and user data they’ve built through the ESPN Bet era.
On the iCasino side, LaBerge said everything will remain the same, except more energy will be spent trying to raise its profile.
“A lot of our development time is going to be spent on making sure that we have the best casino product in the market,” LaBerge said. “The same people that have been building that for ESPN Bet and focusing all of our resources to try to make that work, given our expectations there, are now going to be working on Hollywood as well.”
Cautious (naive?) optimism
Look, I’m not here to tell you Penn has suddenly figured everything out. The company has stumbled horribly twice now with major media partnerships, and there’s legitimate skepticism about whether it can execute a successful brand transition.
But here’s the thing: The product is good. Like, genuinely good. Fast, reliable, well-designed, and increasingly well-reviewed. The withdrawal times alone put it ahead of half the competition, as far as I’m concerned.
Add in $150 million in newfound financial flexibility, full control of the brand and marketing strategy, a proven tech platform that’s showing improved retention, and an established brand in theScore that’s not starting from zero, and you have the ingredients for something that could, might, maybe, actually work.
Will it? Who knows? But for the first time in a while, Penn isn’t asking bettors to trust a partnership or a pivot or a big media name. They’re asking bettors to trust the product itself.
Whether theScore Bet can translate that into market share and sustained growth is another question entirely, but the foundation is there.
