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July/August 2016 // PUBLIC GAMING INTERNATIONAL //
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Gardner Gurney Interview
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continued from page 22
of all the costs, including the underlying
costs of retraining sales representatives
and retailers to sell a new product.
For example, moving from a 4-week
cycle to a 6-week cycle for our Instants was
a huge decision because it required our re-
tailers to adjust to a whole new schedule.
Changes like this are undertaken with full
awareness of the costs involved, both hard
costs and opportunity costs. The NY Lot-
tery is not a small enterprise. Even small
changes can involve a significant alloca-
tion of time and resources. We
do run pilots and tests to make
sure we have a clear picture of
how people will respond, and
hopefully avoid surprises—well
at least bad surprises!
With the record-setting jackpot,
and the residual downstream ben-
efit of that—what did you do to
try to leverage the publicity and
the excitement and add value to
your overall brand and the other
products in the portfolio?
G. Gurney:
We saw some lift
in basically all products during
the Powerball roll-up. There’s no
doubt that much of that lift is di-
rectly attributable to the record
Powerball jackpot in January of
this year. Of course, we wish we had been
more prepared to take even more advantage
of the increased brand awareness that the
record jackpot generated. We are working
on lots of exciting things right now, includ-
ing broadening our second chance offers
into all product lines. I sort of kick myself
on a daily basis for not having that in place
last January for the jackpot run. That re-
cord run brought in entirely new consumer
groups who had never played the lottery
before. We didn’t have the mechanisms to
follow up and reinforce the positive impact
of that exciting event, at least not as much
as we would have liked. We still enjoyed
fabulous residual impact from it, but wish
it could have been leveraged to even extend
the interaction with new players and addi-
tional brand-building benefit.
About the sustainability of the jackpot games
… How do we overcome rising consumer
expectations and leverage the positive public-
ity that only comes intermittently with a big
jackpot, into a longer-term strategy of main-
taining positive growth in the jackpot-driven
draw games?
G. Gurney:
We need to take full ad-
vantage of the media and promotional op-
portunities to hold on to new players and
reinforce the positive impact on existing
players that the big jackpots provide. We
need to capture that new player info in the
form of player registrations so that we can
develop a relationship and communicate
with them going forward.
Included in much of our communica-
tions is the support the NY Lottery gives
to public school education. Whenever we
have the attention of our audience, we like
to reinforce the true mission of the lottery
and hopefully impart to them the positive
feeling of being a part of a worthy cause.
The media is always highly focused on
sales during the big jackpot roll. But we
also like to reinforce the role that Lottery
has in generating support and commis-
sions to small businesses, and the residual
sales that accrue to Lottery retailers from
consumers buying other CPG’s along with
their lottery tickets.
Also, we need to recognize that the vast
majority of people who were introduced to
the game did not win cash despite having
the experience of anticipation and dream-
ing for a few days. We need to provide
them a second chance to play and find ways
to help them have fun and feel good about
playing the lottery. It is also a chance to in-
troduce them to other games that give the
player a much higher chance of winning a
small amount. That’s a very important part
of our promotional agenda. The Lottery is
not just about the jackpot game.
Even though you do not sell lottery
products online except in subscrip-
tions, the NY Lottery has had tre-
mendous success with its Mobile app.
G. Gurney:
We had over
98,000 active unique users of
our Mobile app here in New
York over a five week period. And
recently, we had over 560,000
sessions where people took a
moment to check their winning
numbers app, and see what we
were up to and whether they had
a winning ticket. That is a seri-
ously large number of contacts
with players. Visitors are with us
an average of a minute and a half.
The most solid stat is that over
50% of visitors are coming just to look at
the winning numbers to see if they have a
winner. With our Keno game QuickDraw,
players are using it to check winning num-
bers and watch the current drawing. Clear-
ly, many of our Quick Draw players are
watching the drawing on their smartphone
rather than the monitor, perhaps because
they bought their ticket and then left the
POS before the draw took place.
We just introduced a digital newsletter
that delivered to over 400,000 emails in
one day. We had a very strong open rate
of those emails and one of the things that
we touted was the fact that we have web-
based subscriptions. No discount offer, just
a “Hey! Did you happen to know that we
have this subscription site?” We saw very
substantial increases in web-based purchas-
Decisions about how to evolve
the portfolio of products
rarely focus on the
performance of a single
product, or even a single group
of products. In fact,
the discussions typically
involve a diverse range of
opinions because they almost
always involve an element of
strategic planning.