Casino marketing’s future lies in greater personalization and technology can facilitate it, according to the consensus of a Global Gaming Expo panel on marketing, featuring a mix of marketers and vendors.
“Real activation lies in your hands,” Venetian Senior Vice President Katie Gillis said of engendering customer loyalty. She also posited that Las Vegas lags the rest of the market.
Casino hosts will be making a comeback, predicted Erica Ferris, director of marketing for Monarch Black Hawk.
All panelists agreed that the marketing of the next five years will be more personalized and data-driven.
Advancing this thesis, IGT Director of Casino Systems Kevin Higgins said the manner in which systems convey offers will be much more real-time in nature. It will also be more greatly targeted: “Why spend money via a channel that doesn’t work for a particular player?” Mused Everi Vice President of Product Strategy Vickie Griffin, “Maybe those loyalty and tier points aren’t the way to go.”
Gillis responded that the evolution of player loyalty is a long-term affair. “You need the foundation. You need tier benefits. It has to be multifaceted and if you don’t have the tech to support that, you’re never going to get there.”
“Our current structure is based on Boomers and veterans,” who are very value-driven, said Ferris. Not so with Millennials and Generation X. They crave individualized messaging rather than mailed-out promotional blasts.
At essence, said Gillis, is how to make it faster. That’s where the work needs to be done. This prompted Ferris to assert that all marketing will be digitally driven from now on.
It can be more than just free play, offered Michele Foote, Everi Holdings vice president of loyalty. The player’s first-hand experience, she said, makes it personal and that needs to go into marketing interactions. “If it feels forced, people are going to go, ‘Is Big Brother watching?’”
A start, responded Griffin, would be to break down data silos. Foote replied that digital channels are underutilized at present and “everyone” is fleeing direct-mail for digital.
Higgins confessed that he didn’t know which digital channels are underutilized. “It’s a gut thing.” But, he continued, there is much opportunity for learning how to optimize. Many tools have sophisticated features “buried under the hood.” That means they require sophisticated application and could be more seamless.
“We build a tool that’s ultra-configurable,” Foote said of her company, adding that marketers are very creative. “It’s amazing what they can do with the systems.” She continued that it’s important to make customer-relationship-management systems configurable in such a way that every property in a multi-casino company feels individual.
Operators need to understand how those systems work, Griffin added, even if they don’t use them themselves. Gillis agreed. “I don’t need to know all the details, but I do need to know how the ecosystem works. I make [IT] draw me architecture pictures all the time. They love it.”
Griffin noted that much of what was being discussed is or can be handled by artificial intelligence. “We’re days away from Skynet, right,” she joked blackly.
AI, Foote responded, is going to play a huge role in what’s offered to patrons. It could segment players by their tastes, the games they play, the offers they’ve redeemed.
Not only can this enable casinos to incentivize players to come more often and play more, it can also quantify the success of marketing campaigns. As Foote put it, if you’re going to issue a free set of pots and pans, you need to measure the redemption rate the last time you offered that promotion.
However, rejoined Higgins, the tech tools on offer tend to have too many bells and whistles. He likened it to having 100 knobs on a control panel. AI, he said, can help sort that. “You can get into each particular application and improve it. Don’t treat everyone as a segment,” but personalize the offers.
Ferris agreed that to every technology there is a trick and if you couldn’t spot it, “everything falls apart. Experimenting on our guests,” she added, “is not a thing that goes well.”
Gillis said the Venetian recently launched AI, creating a potential predicament. “How do you explain to a customer that a machine did this and spit it out? ‘It’s the magic. It’s the machine in the back.’” Vendors, she continued, build their products for high-frequency markets, not for things like resorts.
Griffin pointed to a barrier within the casinos themselves. Hosts already feel like they know their customers, she said, and don’t want to hear about it from marketing.
Replied Ferris, “If you can convince a marketer that this works, then I don’t have any problem going down on the floor with confidence in it. I’ve got to convince myself, then I have to convince my casino hosts. Then it doesn’t feel like glitter and jazz hands.”
Experiential offers were stressed by the panelists. So too were different ways of building loyalty. Airlines, Foote offered, do a good job of allowing customers to aggregate points from multiple vendors. “Can casinos do the same, pulling in points from other vendors like Uber and Starbucks?”
Some casinos, Gillis replied, are now experimenting with non-gaming hosts. The very definition of loyalty, Griffin segued, is evolving.
Said the Venetian’s Gillis, “From the technical side, I’d love to figure out a different way of integration,” citing the Grand Canal Shoppes and its myriad POS systems, which she would like to streamline into one data flow.
Offered Ferris, marketers are always buying systems, because they don’t understand them and it’s not necessary to spend so much money. “Just tell me what this does, because marketers aren’t just talking about slot gaming. This is about everything that this product does,” she stressed
The answer, Higgins noted, is often buried in minutia. Ask a tech expert a question and you’ll be told, “Well, that’s on page 375.”