Mark Phillip, Founder of Are You Watching This?!, created the platform to eliminate the “Fear of Missing Out” on legendary sports moments. Over twenty years, this vision has evolved into a B2B powerhouse utilizing patented Excitement Analytics to identify momentum swings and “Instant Classics” in real time.
Through MetaBet, the company transforms these emotional fan reactions into commercial success. By replacing static interfaces with contextual, excitement-driven prompts, they have achieved a 7-10x lift in engagement for Tier 1 partners.
In this interview, Phillip explores the philosophy of “right bet, right bettor, right moment” and how personalized Fingerprints of Fandom™ will shape the future of sports media and fan monetization.
Question: Let’s start at the beginning. What problem in sports media originally inspired you to build Are You Watching This?!, and how did that early idea evolve into a full B2B engagement platform?
Mark Phillip: Honestly, the inspiration was rather selfish. Rewind to the summer of 2000: I had just moved to Austin, Texas, and was feeling homesick for my hometown of Brooklyn, New York, so I made plans to watch the New York Jets on Monday Night Football. What started as an exciting night with drinks and pizza on the couch turned into a blowout—the Jets were down big by halftime, and I was asleep by the fourth quarter.
I woke up to the news that I missed the “Monday Night Miracle,” an overtime win so epic it has its own Wikipedia page. And I’ve never forgiven myself for missing it.
Years later, the idea of using automated intelligence to find great games finally crystallised, and I quit my job a few months later. The living room has always been the focus, and we’ve worked with companies around the globe, licensing our Curation and Discovery tech. But it wasn’t until PASPA fell in the States that we built our MetaBet Monetisation arm to complement Curation and Discovery, growing into the leading B2B Sports Engagement platform.
Question: Sports fans today are overwhelmed with choice. From your perspective, what’s broken about how fans currently discover live games worth watching?
Mark Phillip: Fans are drowning in choice—one out of four days of the year has at least 100 sporting events, and we’ve seen as many as 650 on a Saturday in the fall.
I grew up having just a handful of channels available on TV. Today, the average cable or satellite provider has hundreds of channels, and that’s before you add in the countless streamers. Die-hard fans will always find the game, but casual fans often just stumble on broadcasts. If fans can’t watch, they can’t connect with the team, and if they can’t connect, they won’t become or remain a fan. Brands that actively help fans enjoy the best live games will excel.
Question: Are You Watching This?! is often described as “RedZone as an API.” Can you explain how your Excitement Analytics actually work in real time and what makes them defensible from a technology standpoint?
Mark Phillip: The easiest way to understand it is to envision a win probability graph for a game. It starts in the middle and might go up or down based on swings in momentum. The more “violently” that graph goes up and down, generally, the more exciting the game is.
We invented Excitement Analytics back in 2006, sending our first alert the week before the iPhone was announced. We’ve obsessed over its accuracy for the past two decades, stretching our coverage from the NBA in the States to Brasileiro Série C Football in Brazil, to the T20 Big Bash League in Australia. Our patent on the technology frees us up to focus on building the best tech and delighting sports fans every day.
Question: You track pitch by pitch and shot by shot data across global sports. How do you balance speed, accuracy, and context when identifying an “Instant Classic” while the game is still unfolding?
Mark Phillip: We teach the algorithm to look past the scoreboard because a 0-0 game can be boring, or it can be thrilling. The opening match of the 2014 World Cup between Brazil and Mexico is my favorite example. Host nations are almost always expected to win their opening match, but Mexico’s Memo Ochoa had a goalkeeper performance for the ages in an absolutely thrilling opener. Our engine confidently flagged it as an “Instant Classic” even though no goals were scored.
Question: Discovery doesn’t end with knowing what to watch. How important is solving where to watch, especially as broadcast fragmentation continues to accelerate?
Mark Phillip: It’s required! First-time bettors aren’t asking “Where can I place a bet?”; they’re asking “When does my team play?” or “Which streamer is broadcasting the game this week?”.
Discovery is one of the largest untapped opportunities because if you can answer these questions for fans, you’re the first stop whenever they think about sports. Helping them find exciting games they’ll care about, whether it’s on cable, a streamer, or over-the-air, takes the chaos of the crowded sports calendar and turns it into a personalized roadmap, and that’s when brands win.
Question: Partners like FOX Sports and VSiN already use your excitement ratings and game finder tools. What feedback have you received from media partners about how real-time tune-in cues change audience behavior?
Mark Phillip: Fans respond when you provide the content they want before they ask for it. We had a Tier 1 operator benchmark our dynamic tiles against their static ads, and the result was a 7-10x lift in click-through rate.
Static tiles eventually just fade into the background—our brains learn to ignore them just like any other banner ad. But when you surface an exciting game or an intriguing betting opportunity authentically and contextually, the engagement feels useful rather than distracting.
Question: Shifting to operators and affiliates, how does excitement-based context outperform traditional betting placements or static odds integrations?
Mark Phillip: Sportsbook UIs often feel like a math test. You land on a screen filled with rows and columns of numbers, with thousands of events and thousands of bets. And don’t get me started on the “American” style of wager prices.
Using excitement-based UIs exploits the core joy of sports. Instead of forcing a fan to study a spreadsheet, we surface the right bet exactly when the adrenaline is spiking. It turns a cold calculation into an emotional reaction, allowing the fan to bet on the moment rather than trying to decipher a list of numbers.
Question: MetaBet feels like a natural extension of the platform. How did you approach monetization without disrupting the fan experience, especially in live and editorial environments?
Mark Phillip: To steal from Yankees great Reggie Jackson, MetaBet monetization is “the straw that stirs the drink” of our technology stack. But, we’re very careful not to get in the way of the actual game. Too often, our industry views engagement as rooted in the best algorithm or sharpest price, forgetting that it’s the action on the field that keeps fans coming back for more.
The trade-off isn’t about simplicity versus functionality; it’s relevance versus overload. We use semantic technology to read the room, inserting one-click betting prompts that actually match the article’s subject matter. If you’re reading about an underdog pulling ahead, we’d show you the live moneyline, making the betslip a functional part of the storytelling rather than a distraction.
Question: From an operator or affiliate perspective, what does “right bet, right bettor, right moment” actually mean in practice, and how does automation help scale that promise?
Mark Phillip: It means moving away from binary fandom. Too many apps treat you like you’re either a fan of a team or you’re not—if you check the box, you’re hammered with minutiae about your favorite team until you uninstall the app.
As a die-hard Yankees fan, a game only has to be lukewarm before I’ll want to tune in. But if it’s a Colorado Rockies game, for example, it has to be an “Instant Classic” before you could get me to engage. Excitement Analytics is the only way to craft personalized Fingerprints of Fandom™, enabling individualized engagement plans for each fan.
Question: Looking ahead, how do you see real-time excitement analytics shaping the future of sports media, betting engagement, and fan monetization over the next five years?
Mark Phillip: The future is at the intersection of Curation, Discovery, and Monetization. When used in tandem, you can power notifications like “Luka has 60 points heading into the 4th! Tune in now for $1 or wager on if he’ll beat Kobe’s 81 for access to a free live stream!” And when you engage the right fan at the right time with the right game, it’s unstoppable.
