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// PUBLIC GAMING INTERNATIONAL // September/October 2016
Paul Jason:
You come from the consumer
products industry. What are their strate-
gies for garnering more favorable treatment
from retailers?
Tom Delacenserie:
I’ll give you an ex-
ample. I was reviewing a recent report on
the personal care category which includes
hair accessories, suntan, soaps, cosmet-
ics, mouthwash, etc. Annual sales from
mass outlets i.e. multi-state drug, super-
markets, discount retailers like Walmart,
Target, military stores etc. were around
$49 billion. About $21 billion less than
Lottery, right? Yet, look at the space retail
allocates to personal care compared to
Lottery. The report highlighted the hot
trending mascara category making the
point that Walmart alone sells 1.6 tubes
of mascara every second of every day. 49
million units a year, just in Walmart.
Now here’s the interesting part.
Walmart’s take-away from the statistic
was not the significant number of units
sold but they feel they’re leaving money
on the table! So, together, Walmart and
the CPG (consumer packaged goods)
mascara vendors are investing to en-
hance their beauty department so they
can realize the category’s full potential.
Think about that. Mascara already has
more space and makes a much stronger
statement than Lottery, which generates
more sales. Yet, timely sales data allowed
Walmart to quickly identify a strong
trend and up their commitment to in-
crease those 49 million unit sales. How
does that happen? It happens because the
CPG brands have the data to prove to
Walmart that mascara is a “hot” trending
item and the ROI on increasing its com-
mitment to mascara will be positive.
Without the data that API technology
provided, the sales trend isn’t identified
and the opportunity is lost. Scanned sales
data rolled up nationally can be very per-
suasive to a corporate account. Having to
extrapolate potential from limited data
samples is not what motivates corporate
accounts to act and they don’t have to
do it because CPG companies and the
corporate accounts have actual data that
includes product/category sales for all
stores nationally. The technology that en-
ables them to do all of this is the API. Ap-
plication Programming Interface is the
common language that enables scanned
data to be captured, transmitted, and or-
ganized to inform the decision-making
process. Without the API, we don’t have
the data, we don’t have a story to tell,
and we don’t have the attention of our
corporate retail partners. With that data,
PUBLIC GAMING
INTERVIEWS
Tom
DELACENSERIE
Secretary, Florida Lottery
Application Programming Interface (API) as the Key to a Sustainable
Future for Lottery
Without the data that API technology provided,
the sales trend isn’t identified and the opportunity
is lost. Scanned sales data rolled up nationally
can be very persuasive to a corporate account.