Spotlight Sports Group’s Chris Duncan speaks to Affiliate Leaders about innovation, compliance, and driving consumer habits.
The world of publishing is evolving quickly, and data-led sports content is no exception. Spotlight Sports Group is no stranger to innovation, but to innovate while maintaining audience trust is a fine line to walk.
Ahead of his appearance at Affiliate Leaders Summit in Lisbon, Chris Duncan, chief operating officer at Spotlight Sports Group tells Affiliate Leaders about how he is pushing innovation forward while ensuring Racing Post continues to cater to a wide range of readers.
Spotlight Sports Group oversees legacy publications like the Racing Post, which celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2026. Coming from publishing giants like Bauer Media and News UK, what is your operational playbook for upgrading backend tech and data architecture without disrupting core daily operations?
The main lesson would be to pick your battles; first of all, have a clear plan from the business of where the customer experience and monetisation levers need to go in the medium term, then be able to identify which systems need to be ripped out and replaced and which can evolve over time and which can just be maintained.
For Spotlight, that has seen us re-platform our subscriptions business, evolve our affiliate systems and frankly leave the print production systems in maintenance mode, because they work.
When a brand builds four decades of trust on deep editorial expertise, introducing automated content tools, AI racecards, or new bet-building mechanics can make traditional audiences uneasy. How do you ensure technological innovation enhances, rather than dilutes, a heritage brand’s core credibility?
It’s important to remember that long standing brands are often built on innovation and being close to customer needs; the Racing Post was the first dedicated racing newspaper in the eighties, it pioneered data insights like Racing Post Ratings in the nineties, and integrated app betting in the 2010s.
So part of the brand trust is that we will innovate with empathy for users and bring in new technologies where they assist the core missions that our customers have. Does it help with storytelling for the sport? Does it make racing selection decisions easier for the user like Racing Post Smart View does? Does it give Racing Post customers an edge?
For guardrails, we always have to make sure that the data we produce is right for every race, every day – trust can be easily eroded if we hand over to new technologies too quickly.
Legacy sports titles face a dual operational challenge: serving hardcore, long-standing fans who expect traditional data depth, while onboarding younger, time-poor audiences. How are you adapting content formatting and tech delivery to engage 20-something sports fans without alienating veterans?
I would reframe the question slightly because we see audience segments based on behaviour more than just age; we have many 20 something professional punters as subscribers who spend hours in our data, and many customers who come in once a year around Cheltenham for tips and have been doing so for 20 years!
This does speak to the product challenge that we have which is to meet the differing needs of customers who have a system in which Racing Post data is one component and those that want to jump on the app and make a quick decision about the next race. Our product will have to keep evolving to allow customers to consistently get the views that they want as quickly as they need it.
Print and traditional web models relied on straightforward subscriptions or display ads. As audiences migrate toward native app experiences, YouTube, TikTok, and social messaging, how do you restructure content delivery teams to monetise these channels effectively?
Two parts to that question; we continually evolve how the editorial teams are set up to make sure, for example, we can invest in audio, in short form and long form video, in graphics and data as these formats become more important. In most cases that means dedicated teams to launch and then gradually the skills are blended into the main content teams.
Secondly, we do believe that strategic monetisation will mostly occur on Spotlight owned and operated channels, and that our audiences will expect the same format innovation in our own products alongside those formats being distributed on social platforms.
With cookie deprecation, privacy shifts, and changing tracking laws, a brand’s first-party data is its most valuable asset. How is Spotlight Sports Group unifying audience data across its portfolio of titles to build richer user profiles for operators and partners?
We’ve always run audience data as a centralised function and we’ve doubled the size of that team this year. As an example, most recently we’ve been operationalising a recent audience segmentation across all of our properties and supporting systems like our CRM tools.
That allows us to get insight into user behaviour for our different target audiences at a deep product level, and it’s shown us that the segments do, as expected, use our products differently which then helps us move to the next stages of product development. That same understanding ultimately flows through to the operators we work with, because the better we know our audiences, the more value we can create on their behalf.
Beyond consumer-facing titles, Spotlight Sports Group powers sports betting hubs and automated tipping feeds for third-party global publishers and operators. How do you manage the operational complexity of white-labelling your proprietary technology for external platforms?
We have great relationships with over 100 operators and dedicated B2B partnership and operational teams to do that; it’s a different challenge being a platform or data supplier than being a direct to consumer company.
In terms of complexity we tend to try to build for our audience and then export the winning formulas to the third party offering, so we’re fortunate that most of our technology that heads that way is already battle tested and proven.
Modernising a legacy brand isn’t just about code; it’s about culture. Having managed huge traditional newsrooms and digital teams throughout your career, how do you recruit and foster tech, data, and AI talent within a business that originated as a traditional publishing house?
I joined in January and I inherited a team across Product, Data and Technology that had already been on a long transformation journey from a traditional print business to a digital first business and now an AI innovative business. We recruit based on skills, but we focus very hard culturally on attitude to learning. For most technologists, what they did last year will not be good enough next year, so we need to recruit people into the business that bring a thirst for knowledge and learning. It’s helped by being in sports – it’s easier to recruit those types of roles for sports than it was for lifestyle magazines, for sure.
Managing a matrix of distinct titles across sports betting and media requires both centralised tech infrastructure and brand-specific autonomy. How do you decide which tech solutions should be built as shared services across the group versus tailored for individual titles?
We’re hardline on reusing components across the group, but we define reuse as ‘reconfigured without recoding’, so things like identity, tracking, privacy, conversion tools can all be components – where a sports site like Free Super Tips needs very different data components from the Racing Post.
In heavily regulated sectors like sports betting, compliance can often slow down technical product development. How do you integrate compliance and responsible gambling checks directly into product engineering sprints so speed-to-market isn’t compromised?
I don’t accept the premise of the question – if compliance is a market requirement then go to market speed is dictated by it. We take responsible gambling very seriously and have led many industry initiatives to convince others to do so.
Racing Post was a founding member of Responsible Affiliates in Gambling back in 2019, our people take CAP examinations to stay current on today’s standards, and our product and tech teams work with compliance from the design phase onwards, so nothing is approved without those checks forming part of our QA process. I don’t see this as a trade off, it’s part of responsibly doing business in the world that we live in.
In the rush to adopt new technologies – from generative AI to real-time micro-data feeds – it is easy for media businesses to over-invest in gimmicks. What framework do you use as COO to determine which tech upgrades will deliver sustainable long-term revenue versus short-term hype?
We use a discovery framework to test ideas before we pass them through to delivery, which tests the ideas against our business priorities and the customer needs of our different segments. We have a full time in house customer research team that then takes those ideas and validates them with customers before we then start the build process.
This protects us from copycat or fads in the main – most of those mistakes are made when the technology is trying to find a problem to solve, rather than meeting a customer need.
Looking across the wider sports landscape – from tier-1 publishing to performance marketing – where do you see the primary engine of sports content monetisation shifting over the next 3 to 5 years, and how is Spotlight Sports Group positioning itself to capture that opportunity?
Two trends that I think will serve us very well; in the content space the winners will be those organisations that produce insight, analysis, personalities, and data that are unique and hard to replicate through basic LLM practices. Differentiation will get harder, which plays to our strengths as a trusted brand that invests in talent and journalism.
Secondly, from an affiliate perspective, the winners will be those that can manage a deep and long term relationship with their customers on their owned and operated properties, and can own the customer data that is created by that interaction. If search stopped tomorrow I would back the Spotlight properties to fare much better than many of our competitors because of the strength of our direct traffic and customer habits.
As someone who bridges major media publishing and tier-1 affiliate operations, why is taking the stage at events like the Affiliate Leaders Summit so critical for establishing industry standards, and what is the single biggest message you hope operators and affiliates take away from your session?
Any industry benefits from coming together to share best practice but also to have time to discuss some of the external threats that face our industry – we can learn from each other and work together with each other and SBC’s Affiliate Leaders Summit does a great job of facilitating that.
In terms of the message, I hope people can see that Spotlight is a company focused on audience led innovation, and that makes us a great partner to work with across many different disciplines, and they should come and talk to us about that!
The Affiliate Leaders Summit is the global home of performance and affiliate marketing. Across three days, affiliates, operators, media companies and technology providers come together to discuss traffic generation, conversion optimisation, SEO, paid media and the commercial strategies shaping the future of affiliate marketing.
Co-located with SBC Summit at Feira Internacional de Lisboa and MEO Arena on 29 September-1 October. Get your tickets here.
