Intelitics co-founder on why sports betting marketers are flying blind—and how to fix it

Allan Stone has been in betting and gaming since 2010, but the idea behind Intelitics started taking shape even earlier than that—back when he was watching social gaming companies like DoubleDown and Playtika apply sophisticated marketing data to their businesses while the real-money side of the industry largely ignored what was possible.

"We were sitting in sort of all three of those areas and looked around and said, wow, if someone could bring the level of data and intelligence on the marketing side to the real money side that these sweepstakes guys or social guys were applying, it would open up a massive amount of available inventory and new publishers that just had all but sort of ignored the space," Stone said on the BettingStartups Podcast.

That observation became the foundation for Intelitics, an AI-native marketing intelligence platform that helps betting and gaming companies link every marketing dollar to predicted revenue and profit. The platform connects ad spend data from across the top 100 online ad platforms, partner and affiliate tracking systems, and operator back-end data warehouses—pulling it all together to give marketers a clear picture of what's actually driving business performance, not just surface-level metrics like first-time deposits.

"Our goal is to be the intelligence layer that aligns betting and gaming companies with their marketing investment with business performance across acquisition, retention, and reactivation," Stone said. "Building marketing intelligence that lets real money gaming marketers make decisions and optimize with confidence towards an actual revenue impact of the business, not just some vanity metric."

The timing, Stone argues, is finally right. For years, operators had the luxury of cheap capital and a steady stream of new state launches to paper over inefficiencies. That era is over. With no major new markets on the horizon and investor patience for "growth at all costs" narratives largely exhausted, operators are being pushed to actually justify where their marketing dollars are going.

At the same time, the consumer landscape has fragmented dramatically. Stone describes a shift from the broadcast era's "one-to-many" model, to the personalized "one-to-one" targeting enabled by platforms like Meta, to what he now calls a "many-to-one" dynamic—where a handful of tastemakers, niche communities on Reddit, or hyper-targeted Discord groups have become the most relevant touchpoints for reaching a given customer.

Looking ahead, Stone is bullish that the upcoming NFL season will represent a spending high-water mark for the industry—fueled not just by legacy sportsbooks, but by the arrival of prediction market platforms that are now accessible in all 50 states and pulling in a fundamentally different consumer profile than traditional sports betting.

"The playbook from 2018 is irrelevant. The playbook from six months ago is irrelevant, and that's the beauty of digital," he said.

His advice to operators heading into that environment: stop treating any marketing dollar as unaccountable. "Every dollar you spend as a brand, as a consumer product, whether you say that it's brand, whether you say it's a partnership, whether you say it's pure performance, every dollar should be viewed through a performance lens," Stone said.

It's the same principle Intelitics is built around—and after years of identifying the problem before the market was ready to acknowledge it, Stone says the conversations with operators have finally started catching up to the vision.

Listen to the full podcast on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.