PGRI Digital Library: Thought Leadership
Brightstar Lottery Articles

IGT joined other digital, advertising, marketing, product, and brand professionals recently at the Shaw Theater at London’s Pullman Hotel to experience two days of compelling panels and presentations at the 2024 Marketing Seminar, presented by the European Lotteries (EL) and World Lottery Association (WLA).

The 2024 edition of the seminar explored the fundamentals of digital marketing, its significance in today’s lottery world, and the key strategies that drive its success. It was a doubly exciting time to be in London, as the seminar coincided with the ICE conference – in fact, the final visit of the ICE event to London, prior to kicking off a new ICE residency in Barcelona in 2025.

Bricks to Clicks

On February 5, Day One of the EL/WLA Seminar, IGT’s Ewa Ulicz, Marketing and Product Development Director, 
and Sebastian Meitz, iLottery Account Development Director, delivered an engaging presentation about IGT’s impact, titled “From Bricks to Clicks and Back in Totalizator Sportowy’s Omnichannel Mastery.” Ulicz noted that she was “excited to share how our customer Totalizator Sportowy embraced IGT’s omnichannel concept, putting players in Poland at the center of a digitalized retail experience.”    

Growing Opportunity

The team described how Totalizator Sportowy met the challenge of developing its iLottery offerings in 2019 and 2020, when sales were primarily made up of digital draw-based games. They shared how Totalizator Sportowy enhanced its number of active players, grew digital draw-based game sales, and significantly increased revenue overall by adding eInstants into the mix in late 2020, leading to impressive, consistent growth from 2021 into 2022. In 2023, IGT and Totalizator Sportowy strategized to design an omnichannel campaign to further engage players and grow sales.

An advanced, holistic view of security underpins IGT’s patented NextGen instant ticket security system. Here’s a closer look at how this innovative process was designed to uniquely support lotteries’ core value of game integrity.

“The mantra of any good security engineer is: ‘Security is not a product, but a process,’” observed world-renowned security technologist Bruce Schneier. “It’s more than designing strong cryptography into a system; it’s designing the entire system such that all security measures, including cryptography, work together.”

The distinction between the two approaches is important, especially given that instant games are inherently complex creations themselves — involving multiple disciplines as they advance through design, printing, and the distribution of tickets to their final sale to a player.

Recognizing several years ago that the system for producing instants was ripe for total reimagining, IGT invested in designing a revolutionary, patented new security system, NextGen, in which all the aspects, including stateof-the-art cryptography, work together.

By virtue of IGT’s process-oriented approach, NextGen provides the highest levels of security and unprecedented transparency throughout the instant ticket development and manufacturing process. It is now used to generate secure instant games for IGT customers worldwide. Keith Cash, IGT Vice President Global Instant Ticket Services, discussed the features and advantages of NextGen...

PGRI INTRODUCTION: Following a successful tenure leading Diversity and Inclusion for the National Hockey League (NHL), Brian Blake joined IGT in the spring of 2023 to run the company’s Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), dedicated to ensuring all IGT employees enjoy a diverse, equitable and inclusive working environment.

In his three and a half years at the NHL, Brian launched the organization’s first immersive-inclusion learning experience, which was delivered to all full-time employees including the league’s commissioner and senior executive team. He led and facilitated the NHL’s internal inclusion steering committee, multiple enterprise-wide town halls on topics such as inclusion and social justice, and the creation of the organization’s first Diversity and Inclusion Groups.

Prior to the NHL, Brian was instrumental in reenergizing DEI and learning-and-organizational development solutions at U.S.-based media company Turner (now Warner Bros. Discovery). He also served as a senior career management consultant and organizational development consultant for organizations including JPMorgan Chase and Citizens Financial Group. Brian holds a bachelor’s degree in arts, political science, and philosophy from New York University, and a Juris Doctor from the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law​, in New York

​Lotteries have an opportunity as never before to meet a wide range of operational and player needs. Here’s how. 

One quality has been hailed as a superpower in everything from business leadership to personal fitness to architectural   design: “Flexibility,” said basketball great John Wooden, “is the key to stability.”

The same is true for lotteries working to shape sustainable operations, harness emergent technologies, adapt to new selling models, and meet evolving player expectations. 

To be flexible enough to strategize and act on various fronts, lotteries need solutions that are purpose-built to offer versatility and accommodate changing needs:

• A variety of ways for players to purchase and play
• Equipment to serve different retailer trade styles
• True omnichannel play
• The ability to offer convenient, digitalized player services at retail —and access to a single-player view with integrated data from multiple channels, which can be used to better serve individual player preferences.

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.