When the lottery industry converged on Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, for the World Lottery Summit in October 2022, attendees had their first opportunity to explore all the potential applications and benefits of OMNIA™ – IGT’s comprehensive, modular, and configurable omnichannel solution, built with input from some of the most demanding markets worldwide. Highly interoperable with third-party systems, this uniquely flexible solution empowers lotteries at any stage of maturity with the retail and digital systems, touchpoints, and business applications to advance along their unique trajectories in evolving the player experience to drive growth.
What all lotteries can gain from OMNIA™ is unprecedented player insights via data on player-specific behaviors and interests, allowing lotteries to tailor players’ experience with the high degree of personalization that consumers now expect, for both online and retail.
OMNIA™ Enables Lotteries to Fully Compete with Commercial Gaming Operators for the First Time
OMNIA™ integrates IGT’s established Aurora central system and its successful, commercially proven iLottery platform, which was built to the requirements of highly competitive jurisdictions such as the Italian gaming market.
The iLottery platform is a key component of IGT’s G4 Responsible Gaming certification. Now used by 14 high-performing lotteries worldwide for Player Account Management, Loyalty, Second Chance, and Wagering, the iLottery stack features a proven, flexible Player Account Management (PAM) platform that manages other gaming verticals as required – supporting total synergy for potential lottery expansion into verticals such as sports betting and iGaming.
“People understand that companies like Amazon and Apple successfully utilize artificial intelligence (AI) to improve their business and customer experience,” said Alan Mackey, IGT Senior Director for Advanced Analytics and AI. “At WLS, we showed attendees how the same technologies can be applied to the lottery industry via IGT’s Player Data Platform, a powerful tool that is a component of the OMNIA™ solution and can offer even more insights in this context, because OMNIA™ also provides the data from retail to deliver a 360-degree view of the player.” The Player Data Platform also gives IGT’s Marketing Services team a compelling edge in supporting lottery customers with new insights on growth opportunities via predictive models and algorithms.
In markets where lotteries are still in the process of modernizing the retail environment:
OMNIA™ can unlock new opportunities by digitizing the analog components of the retail journey, whether they offer iLottery or not – to ensure that every lottery touchpoint is digitally enabled via a set of capabilities that IGT calls Connected Play (see sidebar). In this respect, OMNIA™ dramatically increases player convenience and delivers previously unrecorded player-behavior data that lotteries can use to enhance players’ experience and connection with the lottery brand.
For lotteries already operating with mature digital channels and products:
OMNIA™ enables visibility for the first time to players in the retail environment, seamlessly bridging the retail and digital channel to provide 360-degree view for use with its enabling AI and other advanced analytic offerings. All of IGT’s vending, self-service, and other retail point-of-access solutions now enable these use-cases by helping to collect that data.
In markets that have not bridged the retail and digital channels, OMNIA can enable Connected Play – allowing players to begin their journey in one channel and complete it in another, if desired, creating a seamless experience that increases convenience and engagement, and now delivers for the lottery industry previously unrecorded player-behavior data.
Connected Play facilitates contactless, paperless, and cashless experiences at retail by enabling players to use their mobile devices in-store for player journeys such as creating and using a digital playslip, paying with an eWallet, and scanning winning tickets to redeem prizes to the eWallet – all connected to an individual player account and a lottery eWallet, and using player preferences.
The light registration feature within OMNIA™ allows previously anonymous retail players to create a player account and profile with the least possible friction, as only minimal information is required, configurable by each lottery. Relevant behavioral and transactional data can be recorded and associated with this digital identity, enabling the lottery to gain a deeper understanding of player behavior and interests, and leverage Customer Relationship Management tools to provide players with more personalized and relevant communications, promotions, and rewards.
Enabling Connected Play via OMNIA™ also provides an unprecedented opportunity to strengthen responsible gaming efforts, as the functionality of the Player Account Management system tracks now-known players’ deposit limits, spend limits and/or play limits whether players engage through a mobile app, the lottery portal, the retailer, the self-service terminal, or other devices.
Data-Capture & Personalized Content
IGT’s Player Data Platform, an industry first, is an enterprise-wide, cloudbased, data-analytics platform built by IGT experts specifically for the lottery industry.
With its artificial intelligence and machine learning models (AIML), the platform empowers lotteries to utilize a data-driven decision-making process. Decisions can be made based on facts, rather than relying on intuition or guesswork, while automation, delivered through the AIML, saves time and costs.
The platform eliminates siloed data by importing and integrating the data from a multitude of data sources, including :
- Player Account Management (PAM) platform
- Retail systems
- Remote Game Server (RGS)
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions
- Web analytics
IGT’s Player Data Platform is a cloud-based, data-management platform that eliminates siloed data and enables the power of artificial intelligence. It supports lotteries’ ability to understand all players, excite them with the right content at the right time, and bring them closer to the lottery brand than ever before. At WLS, IGT demonstrated this capability as applied to Player Insights, Game Performance, AIML Modeling, Campaign Analytics, A/B Testing, and more.
Leveraging New Insight
Enriched by retail data from OMNIA™, the Player Data Platform provides IGT’s Marketing Services team with an industry-leading edge in supporting lottery customers, as it supplies the toolset to intelligently act upon new data insights to deliver growth via:
- Churn prevention campaigns using AI to predict drop-off in player activity and provide a remedy
- Player engagement models to capture more value by designing campaigns and promotions based on the data
- Games recommendation engine similar to leading eCommerce and video streaming services
- Game performance trends and forecasting to ensure lotteries have the right portfolio mix for their diverse player segments
- Lifetime value predictions to help shape economic decisions around marketing, profitability, and forecasting
- Bonus offer optimization to personalize offers and maximize the lottery marketing budget
Designed to integrate with a lottery’s PAM and CRM systems, the Player Data platform arms lottery marketers with predictive tools and models to proactively engage players with relevant messages and optimize marketing spend.
“The actionable, player-focused insights supplied by the Player Data Platform can drastically improve CRM practices,” said Karri Paavilainen, IGT Senior Director Marketing Services.
“For example, instead of sending a particular player-segment the same offer on the same day at the same time, lotteries can message each player within the player-segment with tailored messages, on the day and time when they are most likely to engage. Messages can be personalized according to the known preferences of the player with the right type of imagery or offer, such as favorite games or games identified by the platform recommendation engine as likely to be appealing.”
- Churn prevention campaigns
- Player engagement models
- Games recommendation engine
- Game performance trends & forecasting
- Lifetime value predictions
- Bonus offer optimization
IGT Marketing Services is a full-service in-house marketing agency that supplements lottery resources with iLottery marketing experts who possess a deep understanding of acquiring and retaining players digitally throughout the lifecycle of an iLottery program. With over 10 years of iLottery and 40 years of lottery expertise, IGT’s dedicated experts work in partnership with each customer to leverage best practices, IGT’s single-player view, advanced analytics, and robust bonus features to support the launch and responsible growth of customers’ iLottery business.
As Alan Mackey observed, “With the power of our platform, lotteries can answer questions they just couldn’t get answers to before. And we can provide players with superior player experiences because machine learning can get to that level of player personalization. With OMNIA™, the data on every player action can be used to build stronger player relationships and greater engagement. That’s how it can really contribute to a lottery’s growth and evolution in the coming years. Lotteries can now tailor game offerings, marketing promotions, and responsible gaming initiatives, and fully compete in the digital space with established iGaming competitors.”
IGT’s OMNIA™ solution can offer all lotteries new ways to compete by providing a single-player view across your enterprise. Contact your IGT representative to assess your current technology environment and, along with an understanding your business objectives, determine your path to OMNIA™.
