Marketing

Windy City Gaming: Chicago will finally plant its flag for a casino development

Posted on February 17, 2021

Casinos in urban environments, not always the norm, have offered challenges in certain jurisdictions.

Major markets such as Philadelphia have had casinos near downtown for years. Pittsburgh and Detroit also feature casino gaming in downtown settings. The Washington, D.C. market, with MGM National Harbor, has also made an impact. But in recent years, more developers have embraced urban environments to meld properties into the fabric of the greater communities they serve. Two of the more recent examples were in Massachusetts, with MGM Springfield and Encore Boston Harbor.

Some of the greatest opportunities for gaming expansion in the United States remain in urban settings. For years, New York, Atlanta, Miami, Dallas and Houston have been seen as potential expansion sites. But the most immediate opportunity exists in Chicago, which will locate a gaming development within the city itself.

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Free to Play

Posted on July 16, 2020

As the sports arena fell silent due to the coronavirus, a host of new sports and games sparked the curiosity of sports fans and bettors, such as esports, Belarusian soccer, Russian ping
pong, Taiwanese baseball, darts and more. However, the main professional leagues and other U.S. sports have moved to free-to-play (F2P) as a way to stay engaged with fans during this unprecedented and uncertain time.

F2P is an opportunity for players to engage with games and products for fun or practice, sometimes in real time. F2P offers the same entertaining gameplay offering bonus rewards or prizes found in real-money games while allowing game producers, brands, and operators to cultivate new customers.

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The Evolving Casino Marketing Landscape

Posted on January 27, 2020

Twenty years ago, there was much talk in the gaming industry of how to engage GenXers, and the potential value of this segment. As GenX is only now becoming a meaningful contributor to the industry, this conversation has now evolved into the current hype around millennials.

What allowed GenXers to become gamers is simple: they began to acquire the two key items that people need to gamble—time and money. As millennials age, we will see them gravitate toward casinos gaming as well. While the demographics of casino participation have been little changed for a generation, there have been material changes in products, channels and, importantly, methods of engaging with casino patrons.

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Rethinking the Premium Players Lounge

Posted on June 16, 2019

Premium player lounges have become a fixture in many casinos in North America. These lounges provide higher worth players with a place to take a break from the gaming floor, catch up on text messages, and sit in a relaxed, non-gaming environment. They also offer hosts a place to connect with their customers. At some properties, the lounge may provide players with some form of food offering, yet rarely, if ever have they been considered part of a casino’s food & beverage strategy. In fact, in most player lounges food is treated as an afterthought, usually comprised of packaged snack foods or some items from the central kitchen that, after sitting out for a couple of hours, have lost their gastronomic appeal.

What is rarely recognized is that the premium players’ lounge, properly designed and maintained, can help the casino property provide its best customers with precisely the kinds of dining that they prefer for their everyday gaming experiences while reducing comp expense and the time gamblers spend off the gaming floor.

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Lessons from the Casino Industry

Posted on January 16, 2019

The casino gaming industry has long been perceived as a competitor to state lotteries. While it can be argued that the country’s adult population has a limited budget for all kinds of wagering, lotteries and casinos have, in fact, long operated in harmony. Casino expansion across the United States has not impeded growth of lotteries and lotteries did not affect the growth of casino gaming. The reality is that lotteries and casinos do not so much compete as share gamers. People buy scratch cards and draw tickets from budgets that are exclusive of casino gaming budgets. This is most evident during periodic events of lottery frenzy, when mega-jackpots attract widespread consumer and media interest. In those states that offer both casino gaming and lotteries, casino gambling does not decline during mega-jackpot events.

Both industries have grown but for different reasons. State and provincial lotteries continue to introduce new games and improve merchandising at the point of purchase. Lotteries also continue to expand their channels of distribution, signing up new retailers, and increasing the number of vending machine locations. Casino operators also continue to introduce new games, primarily electronic, and enhance their gaming environments. They also employ a variety of marketing strategies that are mostly unavailable to, or have never been considered by, state lotteries. Nonetheless, there are valuable lessons that lottery operators can learn from the casino gaming industry – in particular, customer engagement and customer relationship management.

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Cash Back to Free Play

Posted on April 16, 2018

Non-negotiable slot credits, or what is more commonly known as “free play,” has emerged as the most often-used tool in the casino marketing arsenal. It has supplanted cash prizes, complimentary dining and invitations to special events as the primary incentive for rewarding player loyalty.

Its use, along with its occasional over-use, has had a profound effect on the slot-machine gaming experience, and while free play certainly has a wealth of benefits, both to casino operators and players, its prolific use has had unintended and often deleterious effects on both parties.

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The Millennial Is Not Your Customer

Posted on November 27, 2017

Millennial has become the new buzzword and focus of the gaming industry and commerce as a whole.

What do millennials like? How do we design our product to attract millennials? Should we serve only organic food in our restaurants and provide beard trimmers in our bathrooms?
Some casinos believe that millennials prefer table games over slots. Or, for slots, millennials will like skill-based games, so money should be invested in skill-based pits. Despite many casinos trying to attract millennials, not one casino has succeeded in a meaningful way.

The reason is that millennials will not be valuable casino customers for another 20 years

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Killing the Gaming Experience

Posted on July 16, 2014

Regional U.S. gaming markets continue to see month-over-month declines in gaming revenues. Analysts tend to blame the weather, the economy, market saturation, increased competition in neighboring states, and of course, Obama for this decline.

What has yet to be cited is that the gaming entertainment experience has fundamentally changed over the past few years, and many casinos no longer deliver the experiences that players have been used to historically.

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Marketing Strategies That Get Results

Posted on August 16, 2013

The effects of the recession continue to linger. While some gaming operators have begun to enjoy a modest amount of gaming revenue growth, for most that growth has been tepid. To grow market share many operators have resorted to the same tactics that have been used for years in the gaming industry: drawing drum promotions, hot seat promotions, point multipliers and increases in the amounts of free play that players receive as part of their monthly mailers. While many casinos have employed new technologies such as kiosks and electronic drawing drums to better manage these promotions, they essentially use the same tactics that previous generations of casino marketers have done to get bodies in the door.

What the recession has taught casino operators is that tactical offers that are created without sound strategies are rarely effective. They may increase traffic, shift play from one time
period to another but they rarely have an impact on profitability. The following are some of the best marketing strategies of 2013 that astute gaming operators have implemented..

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How to Catch and Keep the Big Fish

Posted on June 16, 2012

Executives in the casino industry have long used euphemisms to describe various types of customers. One term often coined to describe a premium player is a whale. The term originated in Las Vegas and was used to describe gamblers who wagered very large amounts on each hand. As casinos proliferated throughout the United States the term began to be used more broadly to describe each casino’s best customers. All casinos have a few players that make an outsized contribution to the property’s gaming revenue. They may not be whales in the traditional sense, but they are still pretty big fish and every casino operator wishes they could find a few more. To this end, they build luxurious hotel suites, offer fine dining along with other amenities and employ hosts to service their most valued customers.

To better understand how some of the largest casino operators identify and capture big fish, a rather expensive research project was conducted. Two markets comprised of ten casinos were selected. These markets contained some of the nation’s most recognized casino brands. At each property a researcher joined the casino’s rewards program, requested two players’ club cards
and asked the rewards program representative for directions to the high limit slot area. The researcher then was required to find two $5 slot machines (reels) with medium to low volatility, and play them simultaneously at $10 a spin for two hours or until the researcher generated $10,000 in coin handle.

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