29 PUBLIC GAMING INTERNATIONAL • JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2025 or another in isolation. We took a broader approach, based on how retail is changing and how consumer shopping behavior and payment options are changing, and we connected the dots. We mapped out solutions that are flexible, that complement one another and produce more useful data for advanced analytics — from terminals all the way through to next-generation selfservice, in-lane, and mobile.” Speaking at the NASPL conference in October, Melissa Pursley, IGT Senior Vice President, Lottery Product & Sales Development, detailed several of these solutions, designed to help lotteries meet the challenges posed by changing technology and retail environments. “To grow retail, we need to maintain a commitment to the environment in which we’re operating,” she urged the industry. “The top 20 retail chains represent one fifth of all lottery sales locations and one quarter of all lottery sales in the U.S., and they have expressed three primary needs: consistency, efficiency, and data.” By addressing retailer needs and the related challenges for lotteries, IGT’s solutions, discussed below, offer opportunities to meet evolving consumer preferences, provide more convenience, and support continued growth. Discovering & Pursuing New Retail Opportunities DATA & INSIGHTS “An important point of focus for IGT has been to provide customers with an unmatched level of support through the use of proprietary data-based intelligence tools,” said Ascoli. IGT’s investments in this area include Lottery Data Cloud (LDC), an internal, cloud-based, advanced analytics platform. LDC brings together seemingly disparate sets of data from cross-jurisdictional and cross-functional data sources, including multi-state jackpot performance. The tool uses machine-learning technologies to help IGT analysts find correlations and apply the insights to help customers derive business value from them for a wide range of use cases. Another unique tool to support lotteries with retail optimization is IGT’s Retail Market Insights® (RMI) database. It provides data on more than 85% of U.S. traditional lottery sales via 176,000+ U.S. lottery retailers. RMI gives participating lotteries and retailer decision makers the tools to analyze lottery performance trends within and across jurisdictions, including comparing retailer and geographic attributes that impact performance to identify consumer trends and optimize existing lottery locations. By leveraging data from both of these tools, for example, IGT is helping customers optimize the placement and performance of lottery vending machines (LVMs): “We can look at existing performance to identify which retail locations have the most potential,” explained Pursley. “We can also evaluate the specific locations within a retailer for
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