Inside Asian Gaming

February 2012 | INSIDE ASIAN GAMING 37 Casino Marketing 1. ROI Accountability: John Wanamaker, widely considered a pioneer in marketing and the father of modern advertising, is reported to have said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” In no context does this observation ring truer than in the casino industry. It is not just the return on advertising and other mass marketing expenditures that we’re unsure about, but the whole gamut of marketing related expenses, from the salary and bonuses paid to the marketing staff to the ubiquitous car draws and door prizes. Sure, we do try to measure the performance of our various promotional campaigns, but I have yet to meet a casino executive who has been able to quantify the net marketing contribution to the company. With resources getting scarce, marketing budgets are going to come under increasing pressure. This is already taking place in other industries where marketers are asked to assess the return on marketing dollars allocated to a product or service. The metric of effectiveness has shifted from the volume of sales generated to the marketing productivity. Executives who can tie their performance to solid financial measures will be the ones who are looked up to. 2. Data Explosion: Analytics experts are of the consensus that the total data at our disposal are growing at a rate of forty percent every year. This means that every 1.75 years, we have twice the amount of data to contend with. Many executives feel powerless in trying to make sense of the data deluge. Many concede that we are getting data rich but information poor with every passing day. Few executives have the training or experience to harness the opportunities presented by unprecedented data munificence. Yet, advances such as big data and in-memory computing provide depths of consumer insights that data aficionados could only fantasize about just a few years ago. Few marketing professionals in the casino industry have taken advantage of not just the sheer volume of data but the increasingly sophisticated analytical techniques with which to make sense of the data. Marketers will be increasingly required to upgrade their skills when it comes to conceptually understanding the Marketing-IT interface as well as being able to use high-level statistical techniques for solid customer insights.