The name stays off the page – that's the agreement. But the problem this network brought to Epom in 2021 is one that comes up regularly in high-traffic advertising environments, and the results are specific enough to be worth telling.
The company had built a strong market position. The product worked. The audience was there. What wasn't keeping up was the advertising infrastructure around it.
Major sporting events – the Super Bowl, the World Cup, championship finals – were the moments that mattered most commercially. They were also the moments that laid bare every weakness in the ad serving setup. Traffic would surge. The system would strain. Campaigns that should have been capitalizing on the highest possible engagement were fighting to stay live instead.
Now, the team knew that reliability alone wasn't enough. Their audience – sports fans making real-time betting decisions – expected advertising that actually reflected what was happening in real time, not some generic creative that could run on any old day.
The company needed infrastructure that could stay on its feet when the going got tough. And, more than that, they needed a way to build ads that actually felt like they belonged in the moment.
When Peak Moments Become Infrastructure Problems
Sports betting advertising runs on a specific rhythm. Most of the year, traffic is manageable. Then a major event hits and volume multiplies in minutes.
The problem is not that the infrastructure fails catastrophically. It degrades — slightly slower delivery, occasional timeouts, campaigns that don't reach their full impression targets during the hours when the audience is largest and most engaged. For a business where peak events drive a disproportionate share of revenue, "slightly degraded" is expensive.
The team had already tried to manage this through their existing setup. The results were inconsistent. The approach wasn't scaling with the business.
In 2021, they moved to Epom Ad Server's Enterprise Plan.
| Before Epom | After Epom | |
|---|---|---|
| Traffic surges | Risk of performance bottlenecks | Stable infrastructure at scale |
| Campaign delivery | Vulnerable during peak activity | Consistent delivery throughout |
| System reliability | Growing pressure during events | 99.7% uptime |
| User experience | Risk of delays | Fast and uninterrupted |
Building Ad Templates That Don't Treat Every User the Same
Generic advertising just doesn't cut it for sports betting audiences. A fan watching a match in real time is different from someone just browsing casually. Showing them the same old creative that you'd run on a Tuesday afternoon is a wasted opportunity at best.
The team needed ad templates that could incorporate user-specific information — betting odds, event data, content relevant to what the user was actually doing — directly inside the creative. Not as a workaround. As a standard part of how campaigns were built.
Using Epom Ad Server's custom template development interface, they built formats with specific parameters tailored to their audience. Betting odds and live event information became part of the ad itself, not a separate content layer bolted on top.
The difference in user response was measurable. An ad showing current odds on the game you're watching is a different object from a banner asking you to sign up. One is information. The other is noise.
"The sports betting vertical has specific requirements that standard ad formats weren't built for. Real-time data inside the creative, custom parameters per user, templates that the team can update without a full development cycle – these aren't nice-to-haves. They're what makes the advertising relevant enough to work."
Staying Up When Everyone Else Logs On
The Super Bowl, The World Cup, a Champions League final – these are not just cultural moments; they're also infrastructure stress tests.
After switching to Epom's Enterprise Plan, the network gained access to scalable ad-serving infrastructure built to handle high request volumes without degrading under load. The platform held through the events that had previously created operational pressure.
99.7% uptime during peak sporting events. Campaigns ran. Impressions delivered. The team spent match time watching performance data rather than troubleshooting a system struggling to stay online.
BI Integrations: Moving Beyond Standard Reporting
As campaign complexity grew, standard reporting metrics just stopped being good enough. The team needed insight into performance indicators that were specific to their business, not the default set that every ad server offers.
Epom's capability to integrate with business intelligence tools let them extract detailed data and adjust custom metrics in real time. Performance insights that previously took ages to put together were now available on the fly – faster optimization, decisions based on the right data rather than some nearest approximation.
Data-Rich Creatives and What They Actually Changed
The combination of custom templates and enriched data produced a specific kind of advertising unit – one that gave users something to do beyond click or ignore.
In-ad interactions increased by 164%. Users weren't just clicking through. They were engaging with content inside the ad – exploring odds, interacting with event-specific information, spending time with the creative rather than dismissing it.
A 92% increase in click-through rate followed. That number says a lot about what happens when the ad is actually relevant to the user's context, rather than just targeting a demographic approximation of it.
The operational benefit was just as significant. Custom templates reduced ad development time by 43%. Instead of building each creative from scratch for every event, the team reused and adjusted existing templates. Less time on production. More time on strategy.
"Data-rich creatives in the sports betting context are not a feature – they're the product. The infrastructure has to support them at scale, in real time, during the exact moments when everything else is also under load. That's a different technical challenge from standard ad serving."
The Numbers, Straight Up
| Metric | Result |
| Uptime during major sporting events | 99.7% |
| Click-through rate | +92% |
| In-ad interactions | +164% |
| Ad development time | −43% |
The 164% increase in in-ad interactions is the number that tells the most about what changed. Clicks measure whether someone acted. In-ad interactions measure whether someone engaged – whether the creative held attention long enough for the user to explore it. That's a different, harder thing to move.
The 43% reduction in development time meant the team could keep up with the event calendar without expanding headcount. Faster builds, more events covered, same team.
For a sports betting network where major events define the commercial calendar, reliable infrastructure and relevant creative at scale are not operational details – they are what your whole business is built on.
