year until 2016.
3
Brands are realizing that mobile is one of the best
places to connect with customers, and as lottery players look to their
phones for the winning numbers and news, lotteries can offer adver-
tisers incredible access to an enormous player base.
LotteryHUB has already tested and proven its potential for suc-
cess with national brands. RedBox, the video-rental vending ma-
chines outside of convenience and grocery stores, ran ads on the
LotteryHUB app to promote the film Riddick to the lottery-play-
ing audience. Following their campaign, in which video ads were
shown just before LotteryHUB’s live-streamed Powerball drawings,
that movie was the number one rental from RedBox machines.
That kind of success is indicative of the power of mobile advertising
to scale up marketing efforts and get in front of more customers who
are likely to recognize and engage with your brand. With more than
240 million mobile devices registered in the U.S., LotteryHUB can get
advertisers in front of their customers before they’re
at the register.
Perhaps the best part of a new partner-
ship between lotteries, retailers and great tech
is that it doesn’t need legislative approval as long as tickets are
still the ink-and-paper variety. When you’re funding good causes
for your state, you’re working for the public. That means oversight,
and what better way to please the watchdogs than increasing returns
without upsetting sensibilities.
Whether it’s education, the environment or support for senior
citizens, every ticket is helping someone in your state—and mobile
means growth for good causes, too. Marketing is all about getting the
right message to the right customer at the right time, and advertis-
ing on mobile allows us to connect with customers like never before,
keeping them actively engaged with their favorite lottery brands.
The strategies that have worked well for 60-plus years are beginning
to look less effective as the competition finds new ways to connect
with a national audience that’s ready to test their luck. But jumping
into a new era of marketing doesn’t mean abandoning the relation-
ships formed in the past. Instead, LotteryHUB is offering lotteries and
retailers a way to strengthen their relationships, sell more, and capture
new sources of revenue. “With LotteryHUB, we can talk to players
right now,” Duea says. “The app is free to the players and we can gen-
erate revenue on the platform. Let’s drive retail engagement; let’s sell
more tickets.”
It’s time to con-
nect with players in
a whole new way;
time to take hold
of new opportuni-
ties. Mobile means
growth.
u
Public Gaming International • July/August 2014
24
When lottery players visit a retailer, they’re 45 percent more
likely to buy a soda and 54% more likely to grab a candy bar or
pack of Skittles. Lottery players buy 60 percent of their tickets in
convenience or grocery stores, and when they walk through retail
doors two to four times each week, they’ll spend 70 percent more
on average than non-lottery players.
1
There’s a reason (a good one) why retailers have been resistant to
the idea of lotteries taking advantage of new technology—lotteries
moving online could cost them business. But it doesn’t have to be
that way. In fact, taking lottery marketing online but leaving ticket
sales up to brick-and-mortar businesses will be a whole lot easier
and more lucrative for everyone involved.
Right now, the lottery industry stands on the edge of a very ex-
citing new era—the mobile era. Mobile means growth. It means
engaging with customers in a new way and on a new level, and it
means finding new revenue.
Perhaps best of all, however, is that mobile doesn’t mean the end
of the great retail partnerships that have formed in the past 60 years.
In fact, the opposite is true. Mobile strategies can not only help lot-
teries form new and stronger relationships with players, but retailers
can also leverage those relationships to increase foot traffic and sell
more merchandise.
Sell more tickets and sell more stuff along with them. Why do
you care? Because for the first time, lotteries can take advantage
of a new revenue stream in digital advertising. With more annual
revenue than the film, music and video game industries combined,
the lottery is massive and mainstream, making it the perfect target
for advertisers in any industry.
Even better, lottery players buy every ticket with their jackpot shop-
ping list in their back pocket—every time a player buys a ticket, they’re
in a buying frame of mind, and that’s a valuable time for advertisers
to reach their customers. For decades, lotteries have paid brands hun-
dreds of thousands in licensing fees to print recognizable imagery on
tickets and hopefully boost sales. Essentially, that’s paying a brand to
advertise for them, but it could be the other way around. “[Advertisers]
should be writing the checks to you,” says Shoutz President Brad Duea.
“We have a way for national brands to engage with the lottery player.”
U.S., advertisers spent about $46 billion on digital and mobile ads
in 2013,
2
and that figure is expected to grow quickly over the next
year. Mobile advertising is the fastest-growing ad sector, growing
81 percent last year and at a rate seven times faster than desktop
ads; mobile is expected to grow by an average of 50 percent each
By Matthew Isaacs, Editorial Manager, Shoutz, Inc.
1 Jeff Sinacori. “Optimize Your Profits: Build an Environment Not Just a Store.” PGRI Talks: Scientific Games, Lottery Expo 2013.
2 “Digital Ad Spending Worldwide to Hit $137.53 Billion in 2014.” April 3, 2014, emarketer.com.
3 “Executive Summary: Advertising Expenditure Forecasts December 2013.” ZenithOptimedia
