– Shannon French-Demille, Marketing Manager, Jackpot & Regional Games, Atlantic Lottery
– Sanam Bakhtiar, Director, Lottery Marketing, BCLC
– Marie-Claudel Lalonde, Senior Director, Strategy & Marketing Communications, Loto-Québec
– Lou Pagnotta, Director, Marketing Planning, OLG
– Adam Cortiula, Director, Marketing, WCLC
– Moderator: Terri Markle, Publisher, La Fleur’s Magazine
The conference concluded with the Canadian Lottery Marketing Director Panel: The Big Takeaways. Each panelist was quizzed on what presentations had the biggest impact.
o Shannon French-Demille, Marketing Manager, Jackpot & Regional Games, ALC: “Emotion is something we are trying to bring into our brands. There have been some good learnings from that. It is interesting to see how others are doing that. Georges St-Pierre said that emotion has to be authentic to be effective. That is key. The big takeaway for me is how with each of the companies that presented how the customer is at the center of everything they do. At AL that is what we do but sometimes that is a challenge. When it comes to revenue versus the customer, sometimes we choose revenue.”
o Sanam Bakhtiar, Director, Lottery Marketing, BCLC: “One of the videos that really affected me was from Julien Burnett from CRI. He played an ad from P&G. Maybe it’s because I am a mom now but I had tears rolling down my face as I was getting on stage for my presentation. It unexpectedly tapped into some raw emotions. I wrote down the emotional memory bumps from this conference. That one was one of them.”
o Marie-Claudel Lalonde, Senior Director, Strategy & Marketing Communications, Loto-Québec: “For the last couple of years we have talked about transforming from purely gaming to game entertainment. As an organization, Loto-Québec wanted to know what exactly was behind entertainment. Experience and emotion go with entertainment. Cossette mentioned three concepts of playful, socializing and surprising. We focused on making the best out of it from that.
One specific thing I took away from GSP was the white belt mentality. I learn a lot from my team and I am inspired by them every day. I am a big believer in collective intelligence. Just try something. You can evolve but making one or two new steps everyday. I want to steal Big Brother from OLG. The content strategies was really cool.”
o Louis Pagnotta, Director, Marketing, National Lottery, OLG: “I was thinking about the overall experience, the connection to emotion. When I think about the last couple of days, there is so much more when can build emotions on. That could be in activations or other things we do. Emotion is the big word for me. The business have come a long with customer engagements. I was thinking of Andrew Leeper as an example of dialing everything up to take advantage of this transformational time. A few years back I would have said lotteries are behind. Now I believe we are with the trends. I don’t think we are doing enough with audio. The Alexa presentation on using voice command was very interesting.”
o Adam Cortiula, Director, Marketing, WCLC: “I have found the last couple of days personally inspiring and energizing. The question is how do we bring that into our business. On music, I studied music and when the street band came in yesterday, that is a memory that I will take with me. Music has a power to make us remember time and place. We were at the jazz festival last night and it transported back to my university day.”