Pro Football Focus (PFF), the industry leader in football analytics, launched the first release of a new suite of betting products powered by PFF AI: the Player Prop Tool. Available now in the PFF app, the tool is designed to help sports bettors make smarter, sharper player prop picks – using the same proprietary data, player grades, matchup insights, and predictive modeling that NFL front offices rely on.

News Highlights

• Smarter Betting, Backed by Data: Go beyond trends or gut instinct with insights grounded in proprietary PFF player grades and predictive models.

• All-in-One Betting Hub: Stop bouncing between odds feeds, blogs and sportsbooks. Access player grades, matchup analysis and AI-powered betting insights with just a few taps – everything you need, in one place.

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• Find Your Edge: Identify prime betting spots with PFF Edge, a proprietary metric that surfaces key mismatches and market inefficiencies.

• Odds That Work for You: Instantly compare lines across major sportsbooks and identify the best edge – in real time.

• League Trusted Data Source: The only tool built on the same PFF data, player grades, and matchup analysis trusted by all 32 NFL teams.

• Available Now: In the PFF app (iOS and Android) for PFF+ subscribers.

“This tool is designed to empower, not prescribe – we’re giving everyday bettors access to the same caliber of data and insights used inside NFL war rooms. We’ve democratized the most trusted data intelligence in football and built a product that empowers fans to think like the pros and bet with confidence,” said Raj Kapoor, PFF Principal Product Manager, Sports Betting.

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Most prop betting tools offer fragmented stats and outdated odds. PFF’s Player Prop Tool unifies it all – insights, matchups, projections, and real-time lines – surfacing the most bettable props each week in a central hub. Users can explore hundreds of props at once, filtering by position, game, player matchup rating, or price, and jump straight to the sportsbook with a single tap.

PFF’s Player Prop Tool Includes:

• Projection and cover probability

• Matchup advantage based on PFF’s proprietary data

• Historical hit rates and recent trends

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• PFF Key Insights: AI-generated breakdowns explaining the “why” behind every pick

• Real-time odds across major sportsbooks (DraftKings, FanDuel, BetMGM, Caesars, and Fanatics)

• Streamlined bet placement with direct sportsbook links.

NFL bettors wagered $35B last season – a 30% spike over the previous year. Yet most still rely on hunches, highlight reels, or fragmented odds feeds. With 64% of bettors favoring props over moneylines or spreads, the need for structured, smarter tools is exploding.

PFF is bridging this gap with its new suite of betting products, starting with the Player Prop Tool – bringing organized, trusted analysis to bettors fingertips, no matter their experience level. With this launch, PFF is turning decades of data and elite football expertise into a new standard for consumer betting.

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Brendan O’Kane, CEO at OtherLevels, reveals how transforming data into more relevant and sophisticated communications is hugely successful at activating and engaging customers.

Fewer than 100 days out from the start of the new NFL season, sportsbooks will be planning  their marketing strategies to maximize the engagement opportunities that the season brings.

A month after the Philadelphia Eagles go up against the Dallas Cowboys, the NBA season also gets underway. Both landmark dates will long since have been picked out by sportsbook marketing teams as hooks to reactivate existing customers.

However, OtherLevels recent research shows that a reliance on mass seasonal campaigns not only risks missing the target in terms of engagement and activation, but can actively alienate customers. Modern, digital-first customers are smart and savvy – and they see through and ignore generic communications.

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Our findings showed that seasonal campaigning, driven by high-profile sports, is over-prioritised with individual customer behaviors and preferences heavily under-utilized. The study also highlighted a common gap where raw behavioral data – which all operators have access to – is not transformed into sophisticated content and media.

Activation and Engagement

To determine how effectively one of the leading US-based sportsbooks was creating relevant  communications for its customers, we conducted a two-month study of mobile engagement using the app push channel. The premise behind the research was that personalized, relevant and contextual communications lift activation and engagement in sports betting.

Our research team tracked two consistent customers who placed a total of 228 similar wagers on NFL, NBA, NHL, and EPL events. Both customers consistently bet on the same teams and props with consistent cash values.

Our expectation was that the sportsbook would leverage the repeated, predictable behaviour to tailor personalized communications.

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The results, however, showed a significant lack of personalization. Despite both of our users exclusively betting on professional football, basketball, soccer and hockey, 29% of communications failed to mention any of these sports.

A total of 23% of messages promoted college football or basketball, which neither customer had ever wagered on. Soccer, which accounted for 19% of total bets placed, featured in only 1% of communications.

A mere 7% of communications contained token personalization – most of which was attribute-based (customer name or location), with 93% completely lacking behavioral personalization. Crucially, the operator failed to use betting behavior to tailor content related to preferred teams, props, markets, or odds changes.

The research showed that there is a significant disconnect between what we expected in terms of personalized communications and what was delivered. It uncovers a prevalent challenge within the industry: the disparity between the availability of customer data and how to transform this into compelling content and media, suitable for use by a (generic) CRM platform.

To create campaigns that are more effective, customer data needs to be transformed into content and activation needs to be automated. This is not trivial – a personalization engine does not create content, it outputs a JSON data recommendation. Automation is equally challenging. Take the NBA as an example: given that there are over 1,300 games, without an automated content and media creation capability built for 24/7 sports, there is a fundamental gap between personalization recommendations and an exciting, in the moment, customer experience. A marketing team relying on a generic CRM platform, lacks the automated content capabilities to create sophisticated sports content and CTAs.

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Customer-centric

At OtherLevels, our Experience Platform fills that gap. It combines operator or 3^rd party personalized recommendations, live odds, historical betting behaviour, and match context to create 100% automated, hyper-personalized CTA communications, for delivery by existing marTech platforms.

The positive results of this approach are clear to see. For two of the operators we work with, this customer-centric approach to marketing communications resulted in a 16% uplift in engagement across the NBA last season, an 8% lift from NFL for outbound communications and a 30% increase in on-site interaction for sophisticated NFL content.

When sportsbooks gear up for major seasons like the NFL and NBA, a default reliance on traditional CRM platforms that cannot create compelling sport content at scale leads to suboptimal engagement and risks alienating customers.

Conversely, adopting a customer-centric approach that leverages betting behavior and an automated, cutting-edge content and media engine, creates automated, hyper-personalized communications. This approach has been shown to dramatically increase activation and engagement, highlighting a clear next step for more effective sportsbook marketing.

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• Genius Sports continues as the NFL’s exclusive distributor of official data feeds and watch & bet, powering Genius Sports’ BetVision product
• Expanded partnership includes certain global digital advertising within BetVision as well as the NFL’s owned and operated digital platforms which is available to advertisers via the Genius Sports FANHub platform
• The new extended deal will run through the end of the 2029 NFL season

The National Football League and Genius Sports Limited have agreed to a multi-year extension and expansion of their existing strategic technology partnership to power the next generation of NFL fan experiences through official data and video distribution.

Genius Sports will remain the NFL’s exclusive distributor of real-time, official play-by-play statistics, proprietary Next Gen Stats (“NGS”) data and the League’s official sports betting data feed to media companies and sports betting operators globally.

In addition to exclusively distributing official NFL data, Genius Sports will continue as the sole supplier of official NFL watch and bet low latency live games to sportsbooks internationally and will now exclusively represent the in-game advertising inventory. Genius Sports continues to be an official reseller of the NFL’s international owned and operated advertising inventory and the NFL’s legalized sports betting advertising inventory in the US, all leveraging Genius Sports’ proprietary FANHub platform. As part of the agreement, Genius Sports and the NFL will also collaborate on further activation opportunities with FANHub.

The expansion of the partnership will also see the NFL and Genius Sports powering ground-breaking innovations across the NFL ecosystem. In 2023, the partnership launched BetVision, the world’s first immersive sports betting streaming solution for local and national NFL low latency live games on phone and tablet in the U.S, as well as the EA SPORTS Madden NFL Cast in 2024, a first-of-its kind, fully branded live broadcast. GeniusIQ, Genius Sports’ next generation sports data and AI platform, will continue to deliver breakthrough solutions across betting, advertising, broadcast and fan experiences for millions of NFL fans.

Integrity of the game remains paramount to the NFL’s legalized sports betting ventures, and Genius Sports will continue to provide robust integrity services across all NFL games and tentpole events.

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“Across data, video, advertising, and integrity services, Genius has proven to be an important strategic partner through the first four seasons of our partnership,” said Brent Lawton, VP of Business Development & Strategic Investments at the NFL. “We are excited to extend and expand our partnership as we continue to partner on innovative ways to deliver content to NFL fans.”

“The NFL delivers a tremendous platform to accelerate our business, and we are thrilled to extend and grow our strategic partnership,” said Mark Locke, CEO of Genius Sports. “Our expanded NFL partnership further strengthens our leading position at the heart of the sports technology ecosystem, and represents a key milestone in our FANHub rollout, setting a new standard for data-driven immersive experiences for NFL fans, broadcasters, teams, sportsbooks, brands, and sponsors.”