game. At GTECH, we are pleased to collaborate with the entire
vendor community to make this game successful because our cus-
tomers need it and we all need it as an industry.
R. Hargrove:
In fact, some personal call-outs are in order for
the five years of work that went into the development of the NPG.
Let’s thank Arch Gleeson, Margaret DeFrancisco, Ed Trees, and
Tom Shaheen and the many other people who worked on this proj-
ect in years past. Without their foundational efforts, we probably
would not be where we are today with an October launch of a
new NPG.
Let’s go back to Mega Millions and Powerball. How can we
make those two games more appealing to the consumer? We’re
all excited about the NPG, but what can we do to drive continued
growth in Mega Millions and Powerball?
C. Hedinger:
I think we need to invest in branding those games
nationally instead of each state trying to promote those games on
a state-by-state basis. And I think the entire community of U.S.
lotteries needs to agree to work together, and make the investment
in building a robust national agenda that includes branding, adver-
tising, promotions, and whatever else would help us to grow those
games. As a Mega Millions state, we have invested in web design
and that kind of thing. But I think we all need to come together to
take a bigger step and hire experts who can develop a more com-
prehensive strategy to brand the games nationally. We all need to
participate because we will all benefit. It will take an investment
that we all need to be willing to make. $2 million, for instance,
divided by forty five lotteries is less than $50,000 per lottery. We
can all afford to do that and it would, I think, be transformational.
That is such a small amount to create national branding programs
for Mega Millions and Powerball.
R. Hargrove:
We have this conversation frequently among
the MUSL directors and most of us agree with you, Carole, that
we need national branding. But we can’t get forty five lotteries
to agree. How do we get that agreement from everyone to invest
$50,000 apiece?
C. Hedinger:
Let’s start with a proposal. Maybe the MUSL
team could propose a plan to develop a nationalized branding strat-
egy. I think my Mega Millions colleagues would be perfectly will-
ing to buy into an effort that we think will be effective. All I see
are piecemeal proposals for better web design and such. We need
a bigger vision, a more expansive strategy that includes multiple
media and lots of different brand imaging concepts. I don’t see
anything resembling a grand strategy.
C. Laverty O’Connor:
Sometimes it’s very hard for us to talk
about the elephant in the room—and that is a fear of change.
Change creates uncertainty, so it is not illogical to be concerned
about the outcomes. For example, understandably, there are some
lottery directors who feel that developing a national brand and
promotional strategy might impinge on their state-specific efforts
to keep their own state brands front and center as the consumer
focus. As consumer marketers, we want to stay connected to our
customer. Some may worry that the consumer connection should
be locked onto the state lottery and identity and not be redirected
towards a nationalized brand.
We need to ask ourselves, though, what is the goal? Isn’t it
to maximize revenues in a responsible manner, as Stephen said
earlier? Nationalized branding would strengthen the consumer
connection, adding to the value and appeal of these powerhouse
brands, and increase profits. Think about the presentations we
heard this morning. They all point to the same thing. Gary Grief
and Friedrich Stickler talked about the importance of working to-
gether to create a more cohesive face to the consumer, a brand im-
age that supports the emotional connection that drives purchase.
This simply cannot being done just at the state level. Gardner
Gurney presented on the New York Lottery mission to bring Edu-
cation for Life to the people of NY, to connect emotionally with
all the people of his state. Why shouldn’t we explore the ways to
connect emotionally with the entire legislated lottery population
of the United States? Wouldn’t that benefit each and every lot-
tery? After all, not every state can do the things that a New York
and California can do. But together we can accomplish brand rel-
evance at a national level.
As an industry, we need to agree that Powerball and Mega Mil-
lions are national brands and they should be positioned and mar-
keted as national brands. The dividends in terms of brand aware-
ness, and sales, would be substantial. And we should not limit the
scope of nationalization to advertising, or a particular promotional
campaign. We should, as Carole points out, invest in the develop-
ment of an over-arching strategy to nationalize in a broader way,
knowing that the cumulative effect will be far greater than the sum
of the parts. It should include PR, Brand Imaging, promotions,
social media, and most importantly the consumer experience at
retail. For instance, we have been told by the big-box chain stores
that operate in more than one state that we need to standardize
sales data report formats. There are countless ways of embracing
the national character of these huge games which would benefit
this industry. The marketing plan for the NPG will reveal more
opportunities to nationalize our approach than we even realize
right now.
S. Martino:
Could I jump on that, Connie? I agree and I like Car-
ole’s suggestion to think bigger. Instead of doing small initiatives
because that’s all we can agree on, or that’s all we think we can
afford, I too think we need to take a more expansive view, develop
a grand strategy that befits the multi-billion dollar revenue stream
that we are talking about here. We have to invest jointly in the ex-
perts who know how to do that and trust them to develop the strate-
gies that will achieve the full potential of these national brands.
But to my mind, none of that will happen if we do not address
the issue of governance. I think it’s going to be very hard to have
national branding and marketing of Mega Millions and Powerball
without common governance. As it is, we are too fragmented to
make decisions and agree on an actionable plan. As excited as we
all are to finally be launching the New Premium Game, and I hate
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