33 PUBLIC GAMING INTERNATIONAL • JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2025 How are retail and iLottery business functions (like game development, promotional strategy and implementation, draw games and Instants, etc.) coordinated? To what degree are retail and iLottery teams working together? R. Spielman: Different functional areas do work independently to some degree. The beauty of the way that we are structured is that product or game development teams are working hand in hand with the digital teams to build a comprehensive launch and support plan for each of our games. Everyone works with their counterparts in the other channels to build a comprehensive and integrated approach that encourages players to engage with us on all channels. Everything is geared towards optimizing the lottery portfolio with a diversity of games and promotions that appeal to the largest variety of players and motivations. Retailer support and marketing plans are coordinated with iLottery launch schedules and promotions. The digital teams coordinate with the product teams to make it as easy as possible for the players to migrate back and forth from retail to online. And CRM initiatives encourage players to engage with lottery on all channels as well. The content in the digital space is so different than what we're used to doing in retail. In retail, you have your twelvemonth plan and then six months later you get with your vendor(s) to start working on the next twelve-month plan. In the digital space, we don’t have a plan so much as a framework that helps us stay consistent with priorities and objectives and allows us to adapt to current trends we are seeing in the market in a way that we can’t do with retail product plans. There is so much new content and new ways to engage the online player, so you want to take full advantage of that. The framework must allow us to be flexible and agile to move quickly in this digital environment. Too, the online players expect far more diversity of games launched at a frequency that is twice that of retail. We make sure that our online launches and promotions always complement our retail launch schedule and promotional programs. We are working towards further integrations that support omni-channel games that will be similar in nature that can be played across channel. It might be a licensed property or just a game that has a similar play-style or theme. This way we are always facilitating the omni-channel experience, promoting online at retail, and using promotions to send the online player back to retail. How do you promote online at retail? R. Spielman: First, make it easy and intuitive for the player to interact with us online. We are trying to use imagery and protocols that connect the online and offline worlds so the player feels at home when they are on our website. We want the online experience to augment or amplify the retail experience, not replace it. To your question, the digital platform is a tremendous resource of information for the players. Even those who only want to play at retail still have questions that can’t be answered by the POS displays or the clerk. Our website is a treasure trove of information that players want to access, like how many prizes are remaining for scratch-off games, or to check and compare the odds, or what numbers won the draw games and such. And maybe they’ll explore around and find they want to play some digital instant games as well. Is there anything about your online activities and efforts that have applied to retail? R. Spielman: Digital lottery has transformed our understanding of data analytics and how to turn data into actionplans. Ours has always been a culture that values analytical evidence-based decisionmaking. But the amount of information and data you have access to in the digital world is exponentially higher than what you have at retail. New data-sets yield new KPI’s, new ways to analyze player behavior, far better messaging and promotions … it has opened up whole new vistas for how we can improve our way of doing business and enhance the player experience. Of course, we will never have the same amount of data about the retail player. We can, though, apply this new mindset that appreciates the importance of Knowing Your Customer to retail, and get more creative at identifying KPI’s to help guide our efforts at retail. Some of the digital KPI’s translate directly to retail, or maybe a retail equivalent to the digital KPI can be created. And some of the insights we glean from the data captured in the digital space apply to retail players as well as online players. Digital has shown us how data analytics can transform our business performance and that also applies to retail. Do you think players continue to “stay in their lane” and not migrate across different game categories? Or should we think of ourselves as being in competition with other game categories like sports betting and online casinos? R. Spielman: The rapid expansion of other gaming opportunities varies from state to state now, but easy consumer access to the wide range of gaming categories is affecting everyone everywhere, if not right now, then in the very near future. We may be a monopoly in the lottery space, but we certainly are not in the games-of-chance space. The acquisition of Jackpocket by DraftKings has created another potentially more direct form of competition for our industry that may accelerate the rate at which lottery players are incented to try other game categories. So, yes, we do think of ourselves as competing with these other operators for market-share and for mind-share of the consumer. The premium on Knowing Your Customer, on effective CRM, on “TOTAL ONLINE SALES INCLUDING DRAW GAMES NOW COMPRISE APPROXIMATELY 40 PERCENT OF TOTAL NORTH CAROLINA EDUCATION LOTTERY SALES.” Achieving Explosive Growth in the first year of Digital Instants Sales — continued from page 18 Continued on page 37
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTg4MTM=