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July/August 2014 • Public Gaming International
With InTouch
™
we use gamification in a few ways. First, we use it
to drive retailers back to the site by allowing them to earn points
and badges. For example, they might earn 30 points for watching the
newest lottery commercial and they might earn the “Age Verifica-
tion Ninja” badge for watching a 5 minute video on how to verify a
player’s driver license. Points and badges can be used to earn prizes
like lottery hats and beach towels, or can be used to enter users into
drawings. Wouldn’t it be great for a store associate to learn about the
lottery’s latest games and promotions and to earn a chance to win a
gift card at the same time?
InTouch
™
also uses gamification in the form of leader boards. Re-
tailers are very competitive; they care less about their lottery sales
than they care about the lottery sales of the stores nearby. Let’s use
that healthy competition to our advantage! InTouch’s
™
leader boards
are based on sales increases rather than sales, which means that even
low volume retailers can participate. If they can increase their sales
by a higher percentage than other retailers in their territory, they earn
a spot at the top of the board.
A dynamic product line requires Dynamic Planograms
™
According to Oxford Dictionaries, a planogram is “a diagram or
model that indicates the placement of retail products on shelves in
order to maximize sales.” They are used by most retailers and are used
religiously by chains to ensure that the right products are on the right
shelves. They provide retail employees with directed work; store as-
sociates don’t need to make decisions about which products to put on
the shelves, they just simply need to follow the plan.
Many lotteries provide planograms of scratch games to retailers
with each new game launch, but with thousands of retail locations
and dozens of games available for sale, it’s impossible to produce
standard planograms for every scenario. While there are industry-
standard display sizes, there are also many unique displays like
bridges, towers, and other displays made up of modular bins. Also,
different price-point combinations may work better at some retailers
than others. For example, one retailer with 32 bins might carry five
$20 tickets, while another retailer in a different part of the county
might have better sales with only two $20 facings.
InTouch
™
uses proprietary algorithms to produce a custom plano-
gram that is optimized for that specific retailer at that specific moment.
The algorithms take many things into account, such as the number of
facings the retailer has in each sales area of the store, the number of
facings for each price-point (as specified by the lottery sales rep), core
games, new games, best-selling games in that store and in that territory,
the packs of tickets that the retailer currently has in the safe, and more.
Store employees can pull these Dynamic Planograms
™
up on their
phones, tablets, or computers and the planograms can also be printed.
These planograms provide the store associates with directed work—
the decisions have been made for them, they simply have to follow
the plan. And of course, they can earn points and badges by following
the planograms!
To learn more about InTouch
™
visit
u
Educating and Engaging Retailers
Just Got Easier
By Adam Perlow,
Chief Executive
Officer, Hudson
Alley Software
It’s not easy being a lottery re-
tailer. If you could see inside the
mind of the average store owner
and manager you would likely see
that it is filled with candy, tobacco,
deli meat, bread, Coke, Pepsi, Bud-
weiser and more. You’d also see
staff schedules, bank statements,
a reminder to call the refrigera-
tion repair company, and a pile of
invoices. And somewhere in there,
you would see lottery.
Lottery is one of the most com-
plex product lines that stores carry.
Can you name another category
other than scratch tickets where
new products are introduced every
few weeks and those new products
instantly become the best sellers? Can you think of other products re-
tailers carry that require as much explanation as draw games?
Lottery sales reps play a critical role – they are the face of the
lottery to the retailer. They work hard to help retailers properly mer-
chandise tickets, keep their point of sale signage updated, manage
their ticket inventory, educate them on new games, conduct promo-
tions, and explain retailer incentives. They also get to play bookkeep-
er and help retailers understand their lottery finances. They perform
hundreds of other tasks that are too numerous to list. They do all this
in just two short store visits per month, on average.
What about the other 28 or 29 days of the month? In a world made
up of smart phones, tablets, and pervasive data plans, we are still
mainly communicating with retailers the same way we did 20 and
30 years ago!
At the most recent PGRI conference in New York, Hudson Alley
launched a new Retailer Engagement Platform
™
called InTouch
™
.
The goals of InTouch
™
are simple; to increase sales by educating re-
tailers and by providing merchandising guidance for scratch games
—and to do so in a way that will keep retailers coming back to the
platform. The content is delivered through retailer-centered smart
phone apps and a retailer-centered website.
Education through Gamification
Just like lottery sales reps are the face of the lottery to retailers, the
retailer is the face of the lottery to players. It’s important for retailers
to understand your games; if they don’t understand them, how likely
is it that players will? InTouch
™
helps keep store associates educated
and trained by using gamification.
Gamification is the technique of using game mechanics in non-
game situations and is often used to drive website user engagement.
