28 PUBLIC GAMING INTERNATIONAL • MARCH/APRIL 2022 For WLA Members, this 20-year period was bookended by the Y2K fears (remember back in 2000 when the date clocks in all computers switched over to 1 January 2000, and the world was supposed to stop) and Covid in 2020 … when the world actually did stop. For EL Members, this 20-year period is also neatly book-ended by the Introduction of the Euro in 2002 and Covid in 2020 (with a financial meltdown in the middle – in 2008). On the technology side, while Amazon and Google were already up and running in 1994 and 1998, and the first Bloggers appeared in 1999, the social media landscape certainly exploded in our 20-year period with Facebook 2004, Youtube 2005, Twitter 2006, Instagram 2010, “Influencers” 2015, and Tiktok in 2015. But, back to 2002. The changeover to the Euro for the 12 initial States and the 7 subsequent States who joined at later dates caused major upheaval for the Lotteries concerned. Why? Well, the entire portfolio of games had to be redesigned, realigned, and repriced for the new currency. The desirability and use of unitary pricing for the most part also caused difficulty in choosing appropriate price points. The Irish Government, for instance, was so obsessed with not adding to inflation at the changeover that we ended up with a lotto panel priced at 95 cent. Can you imagine how much we begged the Minister for Finance to allow us to round the price up to 1Euro? So, as a direct result of our most unfriendly price points, our sales in 2002 fell by 0.9% for the first and only time in my 18 years as Director. PRICE POINTS All of this shows the importance of developing a strategic approach to managing price points …which leads to one of the first important trends over the past 20 years: the continued player interest in, and sales growth in, scratch card sales mostly driven by a gradual increase in the choice of scratch card game price points. While scratch cards can sometimes be viewed as the “poor relation” of our family of games, we know just how important they are in some jurisdictions, particularly in North America. In 2021 62% of total lottery sales in the US were from scratch cards. In 2020 30% of total lottery sales in EL Members were from scratch cards. And the 2021 figure of $65B sales in the US represented an 18% increase on fiscal year 2020 … and all this in the height of a pandemic. CELEBRATING TWO DECADES OF THE BIGGEST LOTTERY MARKETING TRENDS Ray Bates Keynote EL/WLA Marketing Webinar, 2 Feb 2022 Ray Bates is the former Director of the Irish National Lottery, former President of the EL, and now Honorary President of EL
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