PENN Entertainment executives see theScore Bet’s first two-and-a-half years in Ontario as the blueprint they hope to follow south of the border with ESPN Bet.

That was one of the messages that emerged from PENN’s Q3 earnings call last week, when CEO Jay Snowden and other C-suite leaders spoke to investors and analysts about the company’s operations on multiple fronts.

Of particular interest was the early going for ESPN Bet, PENN’s joint venture with the sports network which launched this time last year and has slowly spread across multiple U.S. states.

“We look at Ontario sort of being maybe a year or 18 months ahead of where things are here in the U.S. from an ESPN Bet perspective,” Snowden said. “And everything that we saw in Ontario, trend-wise, we’re seeing as we go in the U.S. as well.

“Ontario continues to be a really good story for us, which is part of why we’re pretty bold up on the Alberta opportunity whenever that does present itself. It certainly has moved into 2025, we’ll wait on the government and the regulators there to tell us exactly when the go-live launch would be.”

theScore, ESPN both offered existing name-brand value

Some of the similarities to be drawn between theScore Bet, PENN’s leading online gaming brand in Canada, and ESPN Bet are apparent.

Like ESPN in the U.S., theScore has been a sports news and content leader in Canada for many years and had established a base of millions of monthly users long before launching an online gambling standalone.

Although iGaming Ontario does not break down Ontario market revenue figures by individual operator, PENN said at an investor day in October that its Canadian brand held down a double-digit market share in the province in the first half of the year.

“We’ve got a significant number of users,” Snowden added at last week’s earnings call. “It’s interesting because the makeup of our database in Ontario is quite similar to what we’re seeing here in the U.S. with ESPN Bet: large mass-market casual, certainly some VIP play, but the bulk of the users are more in that casual segment.”

Ontario was guinea pig for ESPN/ESPN Bet integration

PENN also used theScore Bet’s longer-standing presence to test out what executives have vaunted most in the U.S. this fall: the direct integration between the ESPN legacy media app and the ESPN Bet platform that officially began at the end of October.

The company launched that initiative north of the border back in the spring, tying theScore Bet’s wagering functionality directly into theScore’s media app.

Executives said the move has proven successful in Ontario and gave them confidence to proceed with the same upgrade for their ESPN-branded offering. Tens of thousands of users have linked their accounts on ESPN Bet already, said the company’s CTO Aaron LaBerge. The customers who have done so place more bets totaling a higher handle and produce a higher GGR per user, LaBerge said, as well as consuming significantly more ESPN content.

Based on the learnings from theScore Bet integration in Ontario and the early feedback from the ESPN Bet linkage venture, PENN will introduce greater personalization within the ESPN linkage as weeks go on, providing such things as tailored promos and offers, content highlighting teams and players of betting interest and even targeted content based on fantasy team activity.

PENN hopes parlay mix in US mimics Ontario

PENN believes theScore Bet’s progress in Ontario is a harbinger of things to come with ESPN Bet in the U.S. in terms of its parlay mix, a topic that has been front and centre in many operators’ respective updates in recent weeks.

“Our parlay mix in Ontario, because we’ve been at it a bit longer there, is comfortably in the low 30s as a percentage of handle,” added Snowden. “That’s up year-over-year from the mid-to high 20s. So we’re already ahead in Ontario of what we’re seeing here in the U.S.”