46 PUBLIC GAMING INTERNATIONAL • JULY/AUGUST 2024 Change Brings Opportunities for the Texas Lottery — continued from page 16 other attributes that appeal to new demographic profiles? What can we do to tap into these new play styles and motivations? We are seeing that being responsive to the market and giving players what they want is leading to incremental sales and greater success. I think we’re just scratching the surface of the potential to integrate digital platforms into the lottery-playing experience. Likewise with licensed properties, experiential prizes, and innovative prize structures. The impact of our Cowboys and Luke Combs licenses are hugely amplified by their own social media megaphones. Lotteries are now sending people into space. The runway for experiential prizes and ability to tap into a new universe of players on social media appears to be without limits. Of course, all markets are local. Maybe some states would not be as responsive to $100 tickets, Luke Combs, and trips into space. But it’s not as if we can’t cater to the needs of all playstyles and preferences. This is true at high price points as well as low ones. Some states have essentially eliminated the $1 ticket, but in Texas, we cut back without eliminating. The point is that everything is changing in ways that represent incredible opportunities for all of us as we learn how to tap into them and make disruption work for us. Texas Lottery has always been good at forging creative brand tie-ins and promotions. What’s in the pipeline? R. Mindell: We are planning to launch Jaws for next summer’s 50th anniversary of the original movie. The launch plan was impressive, but we thought we could do more. So, we began by talking to movie theater operator Alamo Drafthouse who helped us gin up exciting events to support the launch. To augment the launch, there will be a Spielberg film festival in the theater sponsored by the Texas Lottery. During the pre-roll before every movie, a commercial for the ticket will be shown. It’s an effective way to connect with an engaged audience who is just sitting there watching the screen, waiting for the movie to begin, and whose interest is directly tied to our ticket theme. That level of engagement is hard to match. The movie theater loves this collaboration too as it supports the movie. Then later in the summer, a Jaws show will be broadcast on a big screen with viewers actually in the water.! Texas Lottery and our Jaws game will get lots of publicity for our sponsorship. And our brand collaborators, the water park owners, benefit as they deliver more fun and value for their customers. As these kinds of promotional integrations get tighter and more synergistic, the value for both the Texas Lottery and our brand collaborators is enhanced. It is incredibly exciting to imagine the possibilities for reinventing the whole area of co-branding initiatives and promotions. Could you talk about how you assess the ROI for initiatives that are longer-term and have hard to measure outcomes like digital versus more conventional advertising and promotional media? R. Mindell: Our basic philosophy is that the best way to increase sales is to produce and deliver a better player experience across the board. For example, building and implementing our mobile claims app costs money that could have been spent on advertising that we know from experience impacts sales. Some might ask how much sales increased by implementing the mobile app, right? That may be hard to measure. What’s not hard to measure is the level of service and convenience produced by the mobile app as we now have over 15% of eligible claims being paid out on mobile – and we have not even promoted it yet. That is a concrete data-point confirming the value of the mobile app to our players. As lotteries that sell online will attest, the value of digital is much less about selling tickets online as it is about engaging the players in a dynamic relationship. Isn’t the success of the mobile app’ a testament to the power of the lottery’s website? R. Mindell: Absolutely. Our websites are a grossly underutilized resource. They are a direct line of communication with players, they cost much less than traditional advertising, and they are flexible to change the message as frequently as you want. Compare that to billboards which are costly, the singular message is static, and you’re hoping that people who happen to drive by will see it and act on it sometime in the future when they are in a store. The future is in creating more services and benefits for our players, where our players are. How do you measure the effectiveness of digital advertising or unconventional promotional strategies? R. Mindell: The tools we use to measure are evolving. I would submit that we need to use common-sense and judgment in addition to raw data. You might have a data-point that a brief scoreboard ad in a sports stadium delivers hundreds of thousands of “impressions”. And our ad that displays during the pre-movie rolls delivers far fewer “impressions.” I would argue that these raw data-points do not tell us what we need to know. It might be hard to measure the effect of a captured audience who is watching a dynamic 10-second story told about our lottery on “The fact that outcomes may be hard to measure and turned into easily measured data does not mean the strategy or initiative is not producing a powerful impact.”
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