La Fleur’s sat down with Karri Paavilainen, IGT Vice President, iLottery Products and Services, to discuss how IGT’s Player Marketing Services team helped deliver over 600 marketing campaigns for North American lotteries last year:
What was the overarching strategy behind delivering over 600 successful campaigns in a single year?
The digital landscape is competitive when it comes to attracting players. iLottery programs need to captivate their audience and drive traffic to their portals and apps.
By utilizing player data, we can tailor the messages to audiences, resulting in higher campaign volume and improved relevance.
We want to support the player experience in a way that is modern and timely. Instead of lots of long campaigns, we offer smaller campaigns that we can relate back to current trending topics and events.
How did IGT align its campaigns with the unique goals and needs of its lottery partners across North America?
We work closely with our lottery partners. The marketing team has shared goals with the lotteries, aligning top-level business objectives and translating them into specific, actionable, campaign-level goals.
We put the player data at the center of our marketing strategy. We build a robust quarterly calendar that is based on the data regarding what we need to promote.
Our creative team utilizes current events, celebrations, news topics, holidays, and seasons. They generate creative campaign concepts, taglines, social posts, and email subject lines to be timely and on point.
What were the most significant trends in the lottery space in 2024, and how did these influence campaign planning?
A significant countertrend in 2024 was that Powerball and Mega Millions multistate jackpots were less frequent and drove less traffic than in previous years. To respond and mitigate that potentially negative impact, we created more promotional activities to engage players.
Retention
How did IGT balance retention efforts with responsible gaming principles?
We are in lockstep with the lotteries’ responsible gaming principles. We want to create sustainable players who can enjoy the content we provide while having a fun experience. We promote positive play principles and encourage the use of responsible gaming tools to help maximize entertainment while staying within a player’s limits. We have our own Marketing and Advertising Code of Principles, available on igt.com.
Conversion
Were there notable challenges in the conversion funnel, and how were they overcome to maximize success?
We see deeper personalization as key to improving conversion rates. AI is helping us accomplish new levels in further personalizing promotional messages, visuals and offer details.
Challenges and Learnings
What were the biggest challenges faced in executing campaigns at this scale, and how were they addressed?
The biggest challenges are volume and being relevant so we do not offer customers the “same old, same old.” The volume is accomplished by having a strong production process and tremendous teamwork delivering on tight timelines and short turnarounds. We offer dedicated onsite teams with localized knowledge, offering a personal presence with our customers who produce creative, relevant messaging; this is essential to address the challenges of executing campaigns at this scale.
What lessons learned from 2024 campaigns can serve as a roadmap for future lottery strategies?
There is already a considerable volume of player communication. There is demand on players’ discretionary attention from gaming and other activities; we can only take up so much of their bandwidth. We have reached the sweet spot in terms of the level and quantity of communication to players that is right for them. We can continue to focus on personalizing and finding ways to further improve message relevance.
Collaboration and Unique Contributions
How did collaboration with lottery partners shape the success of these campaigns?
Collaboration with our lottery partners is important. They are part of the creative process. Some ideas originate from the lotteries; other ideas come from us. But when we work through concepts, both groups are contributing around the table. We have feedback going back and forth to achieve optimum results in terms of campaign concepts.
Closing Reflections
If you could summarize IGT’s impact in delivering these campaigns in one sentence, what would it be?
Marketing is the impactful, intangible part of an engaging player experience; it creates the brand, it creates the perception, and the impressions and feeling of exciting iLottery play.