The NFL kicks off a new season this Thursday, a fresh start for all 32 teams.
It also closely coincides with a new beginning for Aaron LaBerge, who in July was appointed to the role of chief technology officer at casino gambling and online sports betting operator Penn Entertainment.
He joined Penn to lead its tech efforts integrating betting with the ESPN brand, as well as to connect the company’s physical properties—casinos, restaurants, hotels, and horse tracks—and combine them with digital properties like ESPN Bet.
“I think that is a massive opportunity for us,” says LaBerge.
The sports betting industry is fast growing, yet still maturing in the wake of a 2018 ruling by the Supreme Court that had struck down a 1992 law that had banned commercial sports betting in most states. In the years since, 38 states and D.C. have allowed some form of sports betting, though companies like Penn have to earn licenses in each to operate legally.
Last year, Americans wagered a record $120 billion on sports betting, up nearly 28% from 2022, according to the trade group the American Gaming Association. Those bets translated to $10.9 billion in revenue. But data shows ESPN Bet is racing from behind, lagging the market share of FanDuel, DraftKings, and other rivals.
Penn operates ESPN Bet under a 10-year license signed last year, in which it agreed to pay ESPN owner Walt Disney Co. $1.5 billion in cash, as well as millions of stock warrants, allowing the companies to place a bigger bet on sports gaming. ESPN Bet is about to earn its 19th state license to operate, pending approval from New York, which is expected within the next few weeks.
The relationship between ESPN Bet and Penn explains why joining Penn was an easy leap for LaBerge to take. He’d spent over two decades at Disney, working on big projects like the initial creation of ESPN.com and the first live draft to appear on the internet. In his final role before joining Penn, he had served as CTO for the ESPN and Disney Entertainment divisions for more than five years, basically all of Disney’s businesses, minus the parks.
LaBerge didn’t initially intend to take on the top tech leadership role at Penn. Due to Disney’s vested interest in the success of ESPN Bet, he had consulted with Penn CEO Jay Snowden as the gambling company conducted a CTO search. An offer was even made to a candidate, who ended up taking a role at Amazon instead. After that setback, LaBerge realized he was up for a new challenge.
At Penn, he will be the first CTO to oversee the entire business, which includes physical properties like the casinos, online gaming, and sports betting.
One page of the Disney playbook he wants to emulate is the company’s success developing user identities that provide insight into how a consumer spends their money across parks, the streaming services, and other Disney IP. That gives Disney a trove of data to use for more tailored marketing materials, in turn generating more revenue per user.
“It's very similar to a lot of the connectivity that needs to happen at Penn, as we connect our land-based casinos with our interactive properties,” says LaBerge.
Being so new to the role, LaBerge couldn’t share too many specifics on how that would work quite yet. It’ll be a work in progress in the coming years. He hasn’t made any changes to Penn’s IT organizational structure and remains committed to Penn’s cloud partnership with Google.
Competing with the likes of DraftKings and Fanatics, LaBerge foresees that the industry’s technology stack will operate at parity, meaning all sports betting companies will operate apps that similarly allow users to place and track their bets. The greatest way to stand out, he asserts, is to lean on ESPN’s branding.
He is working to integrate sports betting into other parts of ESPN’s business, including targeting the 12 million users that play fantasy football easy season, and the millions more that watch sports but don’t currently place bets. ESPN Bet is currently changing to offer some users more simplified language so they don't need to fully understand odds and spreads and other sports betting lingo to place a bet. The language can be as simple as: “Bet $5 to win $20. Pick the winner of the game.”
“We have an opportunity to really target how we display betting information based on the sophistication of the bettor,” says LaBerge.
John Kell
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