PGRI Digital Library: Thought Leadership
Brightstar Lottery Articles

Bringing a retail brand to life online, and vice versa, gives players an intuitive, interactive, multidimensional experience that modernizes lottery for an evolving audience of players and drives engagement to support ongoing industry growth.

As a partner that offers multiple routes to success, IGT supplies lotteries with the opportunity to replicate and amplify the fun and ambiance of players’ favorites, in-store and via digital channels, with a variety of crowd-pleasing omnichannel games.

Popular printed games coupled with eInstant counterparts generate added engagement and reinforce a consistent branding and game experience. With omnichannel titles, IGT offers players brands that are familiar, such as from scratch tickets and Fast Play games, so they can be confident when exploring the digital channel. In an October 2023 research study, a Michigan player noted that familiar brands “make you more interested and more excited, rather than some stuff you’ve never seen before.”

IGT draws on a range of dynamic capabilities — including instant ticket printing, eInstant studios, and retail and draw game innovators — to offer versatile omnichannel games across varied channels and popular game types, thereby expanding and heightening the play experience.

As retail transformation accelerates, innovation will support lottery’s success — and reliability is crucial

In a typical week for many households around the world, some type of digital-shopping activity now serves occupants’ needs — from self-checkout in stores to groceries that were ordered via an app and delivered to the home.
But the evolution of shopping is far from complete.

A cross-sector report issued last year by IGT’s longtime trend-research partner Foresight Factory affirmed that the coming five years will see advances in retail’s evolution to omnichannel, with shopper-led preferences driving further changes to the brick-and-mortar model:

“Brands will be expected to create a seamless experience whereby online and real-world channels complement one another."

Lotteries are listening to their players and working to accommodate their evolving preferences. Yet building and running new digital capabilities on top of existing retail systems can be complex. The same is true when reimagining and updating retail environments to make the lottery-player experience meet consumers’ changing preferences.

IGT invested in developing OMNIA™to enable the omnichannel experiences that both players and retailers expect lotteries to provide.

Convenience is Calling.  

We all know that in the contemporary world, convenience is more than an aspiration – it’s a necessity. “Time is a currency – one that consumers are looking to maximize,” reports Foresight Factory, a leading global consumer trends agency. This determined quest for “speedy service” has taken us to everyday advantages we now take for granted: one-tap payments, 60-second news podcasts, and hyperexpedited delivery services. Of course, looming large and facilitating this convenience are ubiquitous mobile phones, used for a seemingly endless myriad of life’s activities – from swiping to select a date to watching a movie, paying a bill to purchasing a plane ticket, “liking” a social post to yes, making a phone call.

With almost 100% of consumers confirming ownership in most countries around the world, mobile phones are everywhere. In fact, a recent Foresight Factory study found that 99% of occasional and/or weekly lottery players own a mobile phone. No wonder jurisdictions are now providing responsible access to lotteries in the palms of adult players’ hands via their mobiles – with no need for them to go to retail, or even log onto a computer. For instance, this ease of use has helped more than 163K Kentucky Lottery players and over 413K Georgia Lottery players download their state lottery apps in 2023.

Offering mobile apps is a natural way for lotteries to strengthen their link to a younger generation of players. As a global leader in gaming, IGT is committed to helping lotteries deliver a convenient — and outstanding — mobile experience to players with engaging games, intuitive features, and helpful tools.

IGT develops and manages IGT’s award-winning mobile app for lotteries, which are made available for both iOS and Android users and can be downloaded from the App Store or accessed via Google Play.

​There’s only one tool that provides a unified view of retailer-level,  lottery-category performance across U.S. jurisdictions, and it’s available at no cost to all U.S. lotteries that choose to participate.

A roundtable discussion shines light on how lotteries and retailers are using RMI — Retail Market Insights® — to address business challenges and fuel responsible growth strategies.
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For decades, the databases used by retailers’ product category managers have included every type of consumer packaged good except for lottery. It’s  an omission that has long needed to be addressed, especially as more retailers are coming to recognize that the lottery category can be a significant contributor to their business goals.

To give lotteries and lottery retailers the cross-jurisdictional data they need to inform decision making, IGT developed the Retail Market Insights® (RMI) tool, a retail-product sales database with a set of monthly data reports and a dedicated staff of analysts and other specialists who support users with a range of tactical and strategic applications.

Among its benefits, RMI gives retailers and lotteries immediate insights into how a lottery program is performing overall and how an individual state lottery’s retailers are performing in comparison to retailer sites in other jurisdictions.

Why Cloud Technology Matters

In recent years, there has been much discussion, on many levels, about “Cloud” – and we are not talking about the weather. Storing and managing data on the Cloud across the global network of remote Internet servers has been transformational for businesses, individuals, and governments, which have begun to use cloud technology for everything from driver’s licenses to tax refunds.

As a result of IGT’s most recent Cloud deployments and solutions, we are making important investments for our customers and progress for the industry, as IGT works proactively to leverage the vast opportunities of the Cloud.

Cloud Native Solution

IGT partners with lottery customers to help them benefit from the advantages of the Cloud. While some technology partners have rushed to offer the first Cloud lottery solutions by “lifting and shifting” their existing systems to the Cloud, just deploying existing code to run on Cloud infrastructure is not optimizing all the benefits Cloud can offer. IGT looks to truly maximize the potential of the Cloud for its customers. To do that, IGT has built an integral Cloud Native Solution. “Cloud Native is not a ‘lift and shift,’” explains Jesse Saccoccio, Director, Global iLottery Platform Sales, IGT. “If on-premise products are ‘lifted and shifted’ to the Cloud, then lotteries cannot reap the benefits completely. Our products are developed with a Cloud Native Solution to seamlessly harness the advantages of Cloud benefits.”

PGRI Introduction: Melissa Pursley was recently appointed to lead IGT’s lottery product development and sales management team, reporting directly to IGT CEO of Global Lottery Fabio Cairoli. Melissa also serves on IGT’s Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) Global Council and is a co-executive sponsor of PRIDE with IGT, one of the company’s Diversity & Inclusion Groups — employee networks structured around underrepresented dimensions of diversity.

Of course, we have known Melissa from her previous role as COO and General Manager of IGT Indiana on behalf of the Hoosier Lottery. While working on behalf of the State Lottery Commission of Indiana, Melissa had direct responsibility for managing the complex and successful relationship between IGT Indiana, IGT Corporate, and the Hoosier Lottery Commission. Melissa’s leadership helped grow the Hoosier Lottery annual revenue to more than $1.7 billion, with more than $346 million transferred to the State of Indiana in 2022 alone, while maintaining the highest level of responsible gaming certifica- tion from the World Lottery Association. With direct P&L ownership, Melissa led a team responsible for business functions including strategy, sales, marketing, product development and innovation, and a network of 4,500 retailers across Indiana.

I asked Melissa to share her thoughts on moving from the operator side of the business to the technology and business-process partner side of the business.

​Through the Eyes of the Player

Recent consumer trends point to strategies that lotteries can adopt now to fuel ongoing player engagement. 

The notion that “lottery isn’t appealing to young adults or those who are tech-savvy” may be a familiar one within our industry — yet it turns out to be a misconception. 
An analysis of recent data from IGT’s longtime research partner Foresight Factory indicates that lottery players embrace technology more than they’re typically given credit for. 
In fact, weekly lottery players outpace the general public in agreeing with statements such as “using voice commands on my smartphone,” “buying directly from a social media site,” and “interested in a 3D digital world where I could experience 
virtual activities.”  
The good news is that lotteries can access the technology, tools, and data to develop tailored marketing plans for both retail and digital that keep their product offerings top-of-mind for consumers like these. And it’s a strategy that other fast-moving consumer goods brands
are adopting.  “The finding about lottery players’ willingness to engage with technology aligns with IGT’s investment  in solutions for both retail and digital that support the experience players expect,” said Michelle Carney, IGT Vice President Global Lottery Marketing. “IGT’s practice of studying consumer trends and related aspects of the lottery-player experience has informed our product roadmaps for years and helped us anticipate where consumers are going. That investment has led directly to the options that customers can take advantage of today, such as IGT’s Connected Play and OMNIA™ solutions.
“We also understand from insights identified by Foresight Factory that consumers —and specifically, lottery players — have a heightened concern for their personal impact on the environment,” Carney added. “They want to affiliate with brands that can prove their product claims around sustainability, and these stats rise with younger age groups. This is another reason we invest in solutions that continue to digitalize the player and retailer experience.”

There are printed games. There are eInstant games. And then, there are games that deliver an omnichannel experience!

As the partner that offers multiple routes to success, IGT supplies lotteries with the opportunity to replicate and amplify the fun and ambiance of players’ favorites, in store and via digital channels. Bringing a retail brand to life online, and vice versa, gives players an intuitive, interactive, multidimensional experience. 

​Popular printed games coupled with eInstant counterparts generate added engagement and reinforce a consistent branding and game experience. “With IGT’s omnichannel titles, we can offer players brands that are familiar, so they can be confident when exploring the digital channel,” said Chris Costello, Senior Director, eInstant Content, iLottery, IGT.

Building and Reinforcing Player Lifetime Value

Business growth is built on the ability to attract new customers. The same applies to iLottery programs. New players generate about 50% of the annual incremental growth for typical U.S. iLottery programs.
Inviting new players to explore iLottery products requires Lottery to be present and visible across the digital media universe. For this purpose, Lotteries annually spend millions on player acquisition through social media and other advertising platforms.

The Demand for Metrics

The inherent challenge with player acquisition marketing is that each media platform provides its own metrics for campaign effectiveness. Marketers are challenged to consolidate data across platforms and make informed decisions about how marketing investment should be allocated.​

Google Analytics is often selected as the metrics integration point to combine traffic from multiple sources and deliver a campaign performance dashboard for the user. While this platform offers many notable features, there are limitations on the data it can process. As a result, metrics are limited to basic conversions and attributable sales. This makes it challenging to quantify the true effectiveness and profitability of a marketing investment. In this time of challenging economic conditions, where marketing budgets are becoming more constrained, marketers must prove returns on their investments more than ever. IGT Marketing Services — IGT’s in-house growth-marketing agency — is supporting lottery marketers to optimize the new player gain from their digital media investment and show true marketing effectiveness.

IGT’s NextGen technology is a breakthrough that takes security further than previously possible — by harnessing the blockchain to create unalterable instants game-creation and audit files.

Ensuring game integrity has always been core to the lottery industry. And for instant tickets, which represented about two-thirds of total retail U.S. lottery sales in 2022, security is critical not only for programming games and preventing unauthorized game reconstructions, but also for enabling authorized game reconstructions when required — for example, to validate damaged physical tickets that are presented as prize winners.

In all of these instances, lotteries can now benefit from a new, state-of-the art patented system for secure predetermined instants game generation, developed by IGT.
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This proprietary system, known as NextGen, harnesses modern digital-security technology to improve on the legacy security processes that have been commonly used throughout the industry for the past two decades. Among its advantages, IGT’s NextGen platform maintains an unalterable forensic blockchain of an instant game to help prevent the possibility of security breaches. A blockchain is associated with each instant game’s unique database and protects not only the entire game development process but also the reconstruction process.

​Lottery sales directors gathered from around the world to discuss the future of shopping and share current challenges and success strategies at IGT’s 10th International Lottery Retail Workshop.

Lottery sales directors gathered from around the world to discuss the future of shopping and share current challenges and success strategies at IGT’s 10th International Lottery Retail Workshop.  

It’s not often that lottery sales executives have the chance to gather with their counterparts from other markets and literally “talk shop.” Recently, 17 executives from 11 lotteries took advantage of the opportunity to share insights and strategies when IGT convened its latest International Lottery Retail Workshop. After a one-year pause following 2020’s online event, this 10th-anniversary session returned to its origins at IGT’s North American Lottery headquarters in Providence, RI, from November 15-17, 2022.

Attendees included many past participants and, for the first time, representatives from IGT’s newest customer, the National Lottery of Malta. Some of IGT’s U.S. lottery customers were also included in the workshop for the first time. “The U.S. is now a different gaming landscape after he pandemic, and its unique challenges generated huge amounts of discussion from workshop participants,” observed Sharon Duncalf, IGT Vice President Global Insights, who co-hosted the two-day event with Paul Riley, IGT Vice President Retail Innovations & Partnerships.

IGT’s 2022 eInstants news headlines read, “Red Hot Progressives,” “Chart Toppers,” “Reimagined Favorite Brands” and “Play it Local.”

IGT expanded its dedicated eInstants studio with an investment in talented developers who turned up the heat to increase the library with blistering new titles, all driven by game performance data, analysis, and customer insight. Ensuring a diverse portfolio of mechanics, many ways to win, and high-impact artwork, the team created a dazzling spectrum of engaging content for players around the world.

All player segments enjoyed IGT’s progressive jackpots, thanks to varied play styles and imaginative themes. In fact, IGT’s three progressive titles comprise over 40% of its top 10 total global eInstant sales. Bank Buster Jackpot and a localized version, Georgia Jackpot Bankroll, was IGT’s number one game, smashing through the amazing $50 million sales barrier with ease.