Power Plays, Pixels, and Promotions: 219 Tips from La Fleur’s Atlanta

Scott Chavkin, Marketing Director, Colorado Lottery

Creating Value: Colorado’s Monthly $100,000 Second Chance Draw

Chavkin walked through how Colorado built a category-wide second chance program out of a 2020 test, and the marketing playbook that launched it.

65. Colorado’s monthly $100,000 second chance draw runs across every scratch ticket in the portfolio. Every non-winning scratch is eligible. Not just specific game families. The draw rolls across the entire scratch category, which means every losing ticket has a second-chance hook attached.
66. “Don’t be afraid to go big.” Chavkin’s framing for why Colorado moved from game-specific second chance promotions to a category-wide rolling jackpot. The bigger the prize and the broader the eligibility, the harder it is for a player to disengage with a losing ticket.
67. The mechanic is invisible on the ticket itself. Even when a scratch card doesn’t explicitly say “eligible for second chance,” it is. The lottery doesn’t need to print the program on every game’s design. Eligibility runs in the background.
68. Retail terminals and digital menu boards show the rolling jackpot in real time. The promotion is visible at point of sale without requiring new ticket design. Existing retail infrastructure carries the program.
69. The launch ran on a teaser campaign. “Coming soon” creative ran before the program launched, building anticipation. The first wave didn’t even name the prize. It built curiosity, then released the detail.
70. Colorado built on Georgia’s lead. Chavkin credited Georgia Lottery’s Rolling Jackpots program as the concept Colorado adapted. The Georgia version (covered next, by Cundiff) is where the data and the funding mechanism sit. Colorado took the same idea and scaled it into its own $100,000 monthly second chance draw across the scratch portfolio.

Katherine Cundiff, VP, Product Development, Georgia Lottery Corporation

Putting the Sizzle Back in Scratch

Cundiff walked through Georgia’s Rolling Jackpots program, a category-wide monthly jackpot mechanic layered across every scratch ticket in the portfolio. The same program Chavkin referenced as Colorado’s starting point.

71. Putting the sizzle back in scratch starts with rolling jackpots across the entire portfolio. Georgia’s Rolling Jackpots program adds a category-wide monthly jackpot mechanic on top of the existing scratch portfolio. Every scratch ticket is an entry. Even losing tickets are eligible. The retailer pitch: “Like getting two tickets for the price of one.”
72. The competitive picture: 8,845 lottery retailers against 42,965 skill machines in Georgia. Coin-operated amusement machines (COAMs) sit in 7,636 locations across the state, with up to nine machines allowed per location. 85-90% of those COAM locations are also lottery retailers. The rolling jackpot is a shelf differentiator in venues where lottery is already competing for attention.
73. Concept test: $182.8 million goal at 23 weeks, $192.9 million result in 20 weeks. Cundiff’s team beat the sales target by 5%, three weeks ahead of schedule. 62,864 unique players participated in the test. 2.4 million entries were submitted. And 1,170 of those players were new to the lottery, so acquisition came alongside engagement.
74. The rolling jackpot doesn’t change payout percentages. Georgia funded the new mechanic by removing 0.002% of instant prize wins per game from mid-tier prizes. Total payout holds. Players keep meaningful wins. The promotional layer is self-funded out of the existing prize structure.
75. Launch with themed games. Then scale across the portfolio. Cundiff’s team launched with “Jackpots Galore,” a themed scratch series designed to focus attention on the new mechanic. Post-launch, every new scratch ticket in Georgia carries the Rolling Jackpots logo and promo details on the back. The mechanic becomes part of the product DNA.
76. Media support: 3.1 million television impressions, 1.4 million radio impressions. Above-the-line support for the launch. Television led, radio carried frequency. The promotion was a media moment as well as a product moment.
77. The participation gap: 88% participate, only 50% know they do. Among lottery players, 88% participate in second chance drawings. But only 50% of those participants are aware of the Rolling Jackpots specifically. The mechanic is working harder than the marketing. Closing the awareness gap is the next lift.

78. “Losing tickets feel useful.” That’s the design insight. Every other scratch program treats a losing ticket as the failure mode. Rolling Jackpots reframes it. A losing scratch ticket is still an entry. Players told Cundiff’s team: “It’s a clever way to keep me engaged, now losing tickets feel useful.” “One more chance to win makes me eager to buy scratch tickets.” “It’s a nice bonus that makes losing tickets feel less wasted.”

Donna Spurrier, CEO, Spurrier Group & Tiffany Brown, Account Manager, Spurrier Group & Bill Hickman, Co-Founder, Mavera

AI: Help or Hype?

Spurrier, Brown, and Hickman took the room through where AI is actually delivering for lotteries today, where the risks sit, and what to do next.

79. Three-quarters of the room are using AI. A quick poll opened the panel. The takeaway: this isn’t an emerging technology question. It’s an integration question.
80. AI is a thought partner, not just a productivity tool. The panel’s framing for where the real value sits. Productivity gains are linear. Thinking gains compound. AI lets you think deeply more often, which changes the kind of work you can do.
81. Use AI to interrogate your results. Most lotteries are using a fraction of the data they collect. Segmentation built in 2020 hasn’t been revisited. AI is the lever that makes revisiting feasible. Same for game design. Run the post-launch data through an AI partner and ask what you missed.
82. Brava is an AI lottery persona, and the use cases are concrete. Spurrier Group has built synthetically constructed AI lottery players with named personas (Alex, a 25-34 year-old digital-first player; Ryan, a jackpot surger). They respond to product and marketing questions in the voice of that segment. The five starting points for lottery teams: player exploration, game testing, message development, sharpened briefs, compliance validation.
83. “You’re the wizard. It’s the wand.” Hickman’s framing for the relationship between the operator and the tool. Judgment, strategy, and player understanding stay human. AI executes. Inverting that produces bad work.
84. The trust gap is mostly closed. The confidence gap is open. Highly regulated industries (financial services, healthcare) are now using AI widely. The risk isn’t the technology anymore. It’s whether operators trust themselves to use it well. Closing the confidence gap is what training and shared learning is for.
85. Shadow AI is the real problem. Staff are already using AI tools unofficially, often through personal accounts. That’s where the data leakage and compliance risk sits. Lotteries that don’t have a sanctioned tool create the shadow problem.
86. Three criteria for choosing a tool: transparency, citations, memory. Transparency means you can see what the tool is doing. Citations let you check the facts. Memory means the tool learns from you over time, and you learn from it. Without all three, the tool stalls.
87. Check supplier certifications. Where is your data going? How is it being used? Who has access? Vendor certifications aren’t a procurement checkbox. They’re the foundation of risk management.
88. Test AI work in parallel with the human approach. Don’t just replace a process. Run both for a period. Compare and contrast performance. The panel’s consistent finding: the best result is human plus AI working together, not either alone.
89. Start with the player. The closing line. AI use cases that begin with the player produce useful work. AI use cases that begin with the technology produce demos and nothing else.

Alyssa Thrasher, Chief, Product, Sales and Marketing, California Lottery

Brand Builders: Creating a New View of Game Performance

Thrasher walked through California Lottery’s strategic pivot from a 100% core-focused scratch portfolio to a deliberately segmented one, and the new sub-category that came out of it.

90. California Lottery’s scratch portfolio was 100% core-focused in 2019 to 2020. Every scratcher in the line-up was designed for the core scratch buyer. Thrasher’s framing question for the reset: “How do we reach more Californians with more types of Scratchers games, without losing the core?” Segmenting the audience surfaced the Dabbler gap, the most casual end of the segment.
91. “Brand builder” games are a new sub-category, designed for top-of-funnel acquisition. Casual-themed scratchers (food, lifestyle, other non-traditional gaming themes) attract Dabbler players who wouldn’t otherwise play. They sit alongside the core portfolio, not as replacements. The 2021 repositioning emphasized fun and entertainment.
92. The unexpected finding: casual-segment games are loved by core players too. California’s “Chicken Dinner” scratcher is widely played by regular scratch buyers, not just casual ones. The casual hook works for everyone. The category lift is broad, not narrow.
93. Brand builders are gift-friendly. California’s data shows the games are heavily gifted during the holiday season. The casual themes give them a different shelf life. They’re product, but they’re also social currency.
94. Brand perception lifted across both segments, casual harder than core. Among casual players, “positive overall feeling” rose 15%. Excitement about new Scratchers games rose 20%. Among core players, those same metrics rose 7% and 14%. Both segments moved. The casual entry point changed how the whole portfolio is perceived. Source: California Lottery Brand Builder Game Analysis, November 2023 and February 2024 series.
95. Brand builders are a niche, like bingo or poker. Thrasher’s framing for the category. Don’t expect brand builders to outsell core scratchers. Do expect them to do a different job: segment expansion, brand lift, gifting.
96. Measure the baseline before you change anything. Thrasher’s closing learnings, in six lines: measure the current state before changing. A baseline is the reference point for everything that follows. Define your key performance indicators and track them ongoing. Different games have different goals, so set expectations accordingly. Consistency is critical. Stay on message about what you’re measuring and why.

Derek Gwaltney, Founder & CEO, Atlas Experiences

Play Beyond the Grid: Expanding Crossword into a Live Game Show

Gwaltney walked through how Atlas Experiences has built a live game show on top of a category that 90% of lotteries already run, crossword.

97. Crossword is a universal lottery game. 90% of lotteries already have it. Gwaltney opened with the obvious starting point. Crossword is everywhere. Which makes it a good base to build on, not start from.
98. Atlas Experiences has reimagined crossword as a live game show, The Titan. Five players, four play rounds, $50,000 top prize. Designed for extended play, built natively for multi-media. The same crossword experience players already understand, layered with a live game format and a social media wrapper.
99. Not every prize needs to be jackpot-scale. $50,000 is the headline on Titan. Not a million. The prize works because the format is the product. Extended play, social moments, broadcast-ready assets. Prize size is one variable. Format is another. The combination is what makes the play.

Ryan Koppy, Sales and Marketing Manager, North Dakota Lottery

The Loyalty Jackpot: What Paid Off, What Didn’t, and CRM’s Winning Impact

Koppy walked through what a small-state loyalty program looks like in practice, on an $800,000 annual budget.

100. North Dakota runs its loyalty program on an $800,000 annual marketing budget. Constrained budgets force prioritization. Koppy’s team tests prize types to find what works with the North Dakota audience: hockey-related prizes for a hockey state, Florida winter getaways for the cold-weather months. Prize selection is creative as much as it is operational.
101. Second chance drawings at $500 work the breadth play. Smaller prizes, more frequent winners, more “Congratulations!” moments. Players love hearing other players win. “Congratulations! I’m next” is the response Koppy’s team designs for. The mechanic feeds advocacy.
102. Match the prize to the season. Holidays bring different relevance. Cold-weather months are when a Florida trip becomes valuable. Hockey season pairs naturally with NHL-themed prizes. Koppy times the prize calendar to the player’s calendar.
103. CRM email to never-deposited players returned 1,578% return on investment over five months. North Dakota sent a targeted email to lottery players who had never purchased online or deposited. The result wasn’t a one-time conversion. Players who had been dormant for five years are now playing regularly. Reviving dormant players turns out to be the highest-yield CRM segment in North Dakota.
104. Measure dormant revival, not just acquisition. The Loyalty Jackpot program’s success metric isn’t headline membership. It’s the proportion of dormant players who are now active. That’s the KPI the team optimizes for, and the one Koppy reported back on.

Derek Levesque, Senior Director of New Business Development, DraftKings

DraftKings: Unlocking New Opportunities

Levesque made the partner case for putting lottery inside a sports betting app, and brought the data to back it.

105. US lottery sales have grown every year since PASPA repeal, even as sports betting expanded. Levesque’s opening chart: US lottery sales trended upward from 2015 to 2024 through the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA) repeal in 2018 and the wave of online sports betting (OSB) launches that followed. Lottery and sports betting aren’t a zero-sum game.

106. Adding lottery to a sports betting app drives more new lottery customers than any other channel. 59% of DraftKings’ new lottery customers came through the app, lifted by a $1 billion Powerball run. The Super Bowl drove the single biggest lottery acquisition day on record. And the cross-traffic ran 10 to 1 in lottery’s favor: ten players moved from sportsbook to lottery for every one going the other way.

107. Sports betting and iLottery serve different demographics. Levesque’s argument: that’s the point. Sports betting is more niche. iLottery is broader. The DraftKings position: combining the two expands the gambling-adjacent audience overall, rather than cannibalizing one with the other. The cross-acquisition data supports the argument.
108. DraftKings consumer trust scores sit just behind state lottery scores. A meaningful number in the cannibalization conversation. The sportsbook app isn’t an unknown brand to the players being asked to trust it. Trust transfers across products.
109. Retail lottery is $99.7 billion. Digital lottery is $13 billion. 88.5% versus 11.5%. Within retail, gas convenience stores are the largest channel at $42.2 billion, followed by other convenience stores ($18.9B), grocers ($16.3B), liquor stores ($7.1B), and all other ($15.1B). The opportunity DraftKings is selling: a digital network expansion that uses the sportsbook app as a new point of distribution.
110. The world has changed. Players have changed with it. Commuting patterns shifted with remote work. eCommerce and delivery keep growing. Older players are now comfortable transacting digitally. Younger players expect it. The retail-only acquisition path doesn’t reach the next generation by default.
111. The retail-only path is getting harder. The courier model captures demand where it already exists. Retail lottery’s natural locations, the gas pump and the convenience store, are visited less often. DraftKings positions Jackpocket (now in-app) as a different point of distribution. The open question for every lottery: is the courier model expanding the network or replacing it?

Amber Seale, Deputy Secretary of Marketing, Florida Lottery

The Power of Good Fun: Driving Player Loyalty

Seale closed Day 1 with Florida Lottery’s everyday marketing playbook, the campaign that anchors it, and the $50 billion number behind it.

112. Most of the year isn’t a jackpot. The marketing has to work that way too. Seale opened with the framing. Big jackpots come and go. The marketing job is to show up every day, even when there’s no headline event to ride. Daily presence builds the player relationship between jackpots.
113. Social media is the everyday channel. Showing up every day. Bitesize content. Florida uses social to explain how each game works, surface user-generated content (players celebrating their own wins), and tell beneficiary stories. The cadence is the point.
114. The “It’s Good Fun” campaign personifies the Florida Lottery as a Department of Good Fun. A whimsical, other-worldly brand identity built to forge an emotional connection with a younger audience. The campaign carries a dual message: it’s fun, and it does good. Funding education is part of the playful brand world, not a separate corporate message.
115. Every customer complaint becomes content. When a player says “I don’t understand,” Seale’s team makes a piece of explainer content. Complaints become an editorial pipeline. The lottery turns confusion into clarity at scale.
116. User-generated content is the strongest performer. Players love seeing other players win. They cheer for them. UGC does what the lottery’s owned content can’t. Real winners, real reactions, real social proof.
117. Serve core players while finding new ones, through different channels for each. Florida’s framework: Core players come through point of purchase, scratch-offs, and flagship games. New players come through contextual advertising, gamified ad units, and trend-worthy social content. Both segments meet at digital engagement. The lottery doesn’t have to choose one or the other. It has to design for both.
118. Florida Lottery has contributed more than $50 billion to education. The number anchors the Good Fun messaging. Bright Futures stories, the scholarships the lottery funds, give the brand its purpose. Play and Purpose are the twin pillars of the program.

Kate Airey, Director, Product Development, Maryland Lottery & Matt Nichols, VP, Products, Kentucky Lottery & Scott Kenyon, Deputy Executive Director of Marketing, Virginia Lottery

Panel: Product/Marketing Directors

Day 2 opened with three states approaching the same problems from different angles. Maryland, Kentucky, and Virginia, each operating under different constraints, each finding a different first move.

119. Kentucky calls it “connected play”: retail and digital as one experience from the player’s side. Matt Nichols said the uptake has been organic. Players don’t choose retail or digital. They pick whichever is easier in the moment.
120. Virginia’s lever is mobile-app personalization, segmented by player spend. Scott Kenyon: “This is unique to me.” A $5 player sees different offers and games to a $30 player. With more than 100 games in the catalog, segmentation is how you make it feel curated.
121. Maryland is hemmed in by legislation. Kate Airey: “It’s tough when you have legislative handcuffs.” The team focuses on the experience instead, with live event activations for prize winners and a player journey that gives the same product a different feel.
122. Maryland’s product development team is fully staffed for the first time since 2014. The state’s product capacity has been understaffed for over a decade. Watch what Maryland does next.
123. Retailers don’t believe the lottery wants to support them. Airey’s read on a 50-year relationship. The lottery has helped pay the rent for half a century, but the perception of partnership has decayed. Fix the relationship before fixing the experience.
124. The biggest near-term operational challenge is the disappearance of cash. Kenyon: fewer players carry it. Taking payment for tickets gets harder. Handing out winnings gets harder. Lottery’s operational model is built on cash, and the consumer shift away from it is mid-flight.
125. Succession is the other industry-wide concern. A generation of lottery expertise is about to retire. The replacement pipeline isn’t obvious. Game design, retailer relationships, and regulatory navigation are about to walk out the door.
126. Scratch is softening as a category. Headline sales numbers can hide that. Personalization is the lever Kentucky is betting will help, but only if the message doesn’t demand too much from the player.
127. “I don’t go very deep on the Netflix scroll.” Nichols on lottery personalization. With 100+ games, the temptation is to surface them all. The right play is the opposite. Netflix has thousands of titles, and most users watch what’s served in the first three rows.
128. “People can’t buy all the things.” Airey on the macro picture. 2008, COVID, and now an economic slowdown have stretched the same household budget through three crises. Players have more entertainment options than ever: sports wagering on phones, streaming, every other category competing for discretionary spend. Lottery is competing for share of wallet.
129. The Virginia online raffle failed because the team didn’t watch Reddit. Kenyon’s most useful admission. Virginia launched online raffles with two sports-team partnerships. Prizes included traveling with the team. The package didn’t sell. The feedback was visible in the Lottery Reddit thread, where players said the prize was a big commitment for the winner. The lesson: monitor the channels where players talk to each other before you scale.
130. The “everyone wins a prize” Kentucky scratcher failed for the same reason. Nichols: the team designed a ticket where every player won something. But the prize was worth less than the ticket. Consumers hated it. Players don’t read prize tables. They feel the value immediately.

Adam Owens, Director of Corporate Communications, North Carolina Education Lottery

What’s New at Retail in North Carolina

Owens walked through the multi-year retail plan that came out of NC Lottery’s 2025 retail summit, and the numbers behind it.

131. NC’s 2025 retail summit became a multi-year plan, anchored on three pillars: digital menu boards, SciQ technology, and vending. Owens’s team convened retailers, mapped the friction, and built the investment plan around what retailers said they needed.
132. Digital menu boards: pilot expected $70 million annual lift. Now expecting $240 million. NC worked with retailers to place boards in the most visible spots in store. Most of the content is produced in-house, anchored on the beneficiary story (NC’s lottery funds education). 1,500 stores planned at full rollout.
133. Sales are 16% up against the comparable period. A short-term read, but a strong early signal. Owens was direct: “Are these things just shiny and new? We’ll find out.”
134. SciQ technology delivered a 20% sales improvement vs non-SciQ stores. SciQ reduces behind-the-counter work for retailers and surfaces real-time visibility into out-of-stock tickets and purchase behavior. Retailers spend less time at the counter. The lottery sells more.
135. Vending: $300 million in anticipated annual sales lift from a 1,500-store rollout. Significant capital investment. NC is using vending to expand the lottery’s footprint into the moments when staff aren’t behind the counter.
136. Next: eye-tracking studies and emotional customer journey mapping. Owens is moving past terminals to the in-store experience itself, mapping where the player’s attention goes and where the emotional friction sits. NC is surveying its retail staff to find journey opportunities the lottery hasn’t seen.
137. “Fleeting moments of attention.” That’s the marketing job. Owens is expanding the content team to win those short windows. In-store dwell time is measured in seconds. The content has to land fast.

Jennifer Ekholtz, VP of iLottery Operations, Aristocrat Interactive & Steven Desautels, Regional Vice President, Bally’s Intralot & Nathanael Worley, VP, Customer Sales Development, Brightstar Lottery & Joey Lewis, VP, Loyalty & CRM, Scientific Games & Shannon DeHaven, Senior Vice President, Digital Engagement, Pollard Banknote

Platinum Panel Discussion

Five vendor leaders, one shared agenda: how should lottery leadership be reading the macro environment, and what should they be doing about it.

138. Lottery typically fares well in a downturn. Gas prices are the new exception. Recessions don’t dent the category much. But geopolitical events that drive gas prices correlate with scratcher sales declines. When pump money tightens, impulse purchases at the counter slow down.
139. Lottery has 220,000 retail establishments across America, front and center. Worley’s frame: that’s a distribution network most consumer brands would envy.
140. A scratch ticket should be the invitation to a digital world. Lewis: scan the ticket via QR code, land in loyalty, find related digital games, see other scratch families. The physical product becomes the acquisition step into a digital relationship.
141. Follow the data. A $5 customer is different from a $30 customer. Lewis: average spend is the starting segmentation. Behavior, channel preference, time of day, and product mix all layer on top. One-size-fits-all messaging is done.
142. “A frictionless experience.” DeHaven on what makes second-chance programs and digital extensions work. Effortless beats exciting every time. Friction kills the most promising digital additions.
143. Artificial intelligence is going to play a major role in personalization and operational efficiency. The shared panel view. The question is how fast each lottery moves. Personalization is the obvious near-term application. Operational efficiency (back office, marketing operations, content) is where lotteries with sanctioned tools will pull ahead.
144. Long term, we’re heading to a cashless society. Lotteries are struggling to move quickly enough. DeHaven’s structural framing. The legislative environment, the retailer relationships, the regulatory approvals: none of them are paced for the speed of the consumer payment shift. Closing that gap is the precondition for everything else.
145. The government relations argument: lottery returns 75 cents on the dollar to good causes. Sports betting returns 25. DeHaven’s call: lotteries need to tell this story to legislators more consistently. It’s the most defensible argument lottery has in regulatory conversations, and one most state lotteries could make more loudly.
146. The competition has deeper pockets. The data investment has to pay back. Sports betting and casino operators have more capital. Lotteries can’t out-spend them, so the data investments they do make must deliver clear returns.
147. The 1-to-1 player relationship is the barometer. Players compare lottery to Amazon and their hotel stay. DeHaven: the player’s benchmark is every other digital service they use. That’s the experience standard lottery has to meet.
148. “Without execution, vision is just another word for hallucination.” Quoted from the former CEO of Oracle. The panel landed on this as the standing test for every lottery’s strategy deck.
149. Brightstar has rolled out an AI education campaign for employees, and is rolling out Claude Code internally. Worley named the specific moves Brightstar is making to put AI to work across its business.
150. The lotteries Worley named as setting the standards: North Carolina, West Virginia, Kansas, Pennsylvania, and several more. North Carolina and West Virginia for full-journey visibility. Kansas for retention. Pennsylvania for trialing eInstants in retail kiosks.
151. “We can’t afford six months to roll out a game.” The pace argument. Traditional game development cycles are too long for how fast player expectations shift.
152. In a time of change, create psychological safety. The closing thread. People do the work. AI, partnerships, technology, data: all of it depends on the lottery’s team having safety to try new things. Machines won’t replace storytelling and emotional connection.

Steve Koonin, CEO, Atlanta Hawks and State Farm Arena

Koonin’s keynote was a personal interview, not a slide deck. He spent the session telling stories from a career at Coca-Cola, Turner, and the Atlanta Hawks. The throughline: creativity as a business discipline.

153. “Creativity can be a currency.” Koonin’s frame for why ideas matter as a business asset. Lottery has the creative capacity. The question is whether the operating model lets you spend that currency.
154. Anchor every idea to strategy and results. Koonin’s first test for an idea: what’s the strategy this serves, what result does it deliver? If neither is clear, it isn’t ready.
155. Keep it simple, so the consumer can understand it. A reminder from the brand world the lottery industry hears often but applies less. The most effective campaigns are simple enough that a six-year-old gets the idea.
156. “There’s no damage in asking a not-very-smart question. There is a risk in not being curious.” Koonin’s framing for organizational curiosity. The dumb question is cheap; not asking it costs you over time.
157. Brand is built on the small moments as much as the big commercials. Koonin’s call to look at the in-arena experience, the parking, the merchandise, the staff interactions. Most lottery brand investment goes to television and digital. Most brand impressions happen at retail.
158. In a multi-cluttered world, relevance beats ubiquity. Brands are everywhere. What matters is whether the moment matters to the person seeing it.
159. “I have so many examples of failure to choose from.” Koonin on the necessity of a failure culture. Trying to be different should be rewarded in organizations. The lotteries that punish failed experiments end up making safe choices, which means making the same choices everyone else is making.
160. Project autopsies. “Stick your hands into the guts.” Koonin’s process: find out why something worked or failed, past the surface explanation. The post-project review is the most-skipped step in lottery marketing, and the highest-yield.
161. Give yourself a minute to breathe. Capture the learnings. Between project end and the next launch, write down what you learned. Otherwise it disappears.
162. Ted Turner’s recipe: “inspiration, perspiration, nerves of steel.” Koonin’s nod to Atlanta’s defining media entrepreneur. The three together are what get you through a contrarian play; one or two of them alone isn’t enough.
163. In sports, you sell sustained success or hope. The team’s win-loss record is what it is, so the controllable variable is the experience around the game. Koonin’s Hawks transformation: a Hawk bar behind the baskets, a four-tier barber shop overlooking the court, a 22,000 square foot eating area with crystal chandeliers and marble countertops. Open every game. Zac Brown does eat-and-greets with fans. The food gets good reviews. “The days of a warm beer and a cold hot dog don’t cut it.” The lottery analog: the games are what they are. The experience around them is the brand’s most controllable asset.
164. “I don’t read books. I read newsletters and newspapers. Clip them and send them to my team.” Koonin’s intake habit. He reads for 3 to 4 hours a day.

Zoe Ebling, VP, Interactive, AGS

More Than Scratch: How Digital Changes Player Behavior

Ebling’s session walked through what other digital categories have already done, and what lottery can pattern-match. Sports betting, mobile banking, and music streaming all show the same shape.

165. The US sports betting industry has generated nearly half a trillion dollars in five years. It used to be local and offline. The product is now digital, ubiquitous, and the template for how a new gambling product scales.
166. Digital increases the total addressable market (TAM). The growth comes from new behavior, not redistribution. When a product moves online, it reaches people who never engaged offline. That’s where the half-trillion came from.
167. The black-market threat is one Google search away. Type “online casino” into Google. Black-market sites appear alongside regulated ones. The unregulated alternative is one click away every time.
168. Sports betting created moments around the game. Pre-game, in-game, post-game, each one a new engagement window. For lottery, that means designing more moments around each game cycle.
169. The Chime banking analog: branch visitors became daily app users. Mobile banking turned an occasional in-person interaction into a multi-touch daily relationship. Chime hit tens of millions of users in a few years. The technology unlocked new behavior.
170. DraftKings says some customers come 16 times a day. Ebling’s data point on engagement depth. Sports betting has engineered its players into compulsive checkers. For lottery, the question is what 16 daily touchpoints would look like for its audience, and what content would fill them.
171. Recorded music went from $7 billion to $17 billion in a decade. Streaming did that. The shift from physical ownership to digital subscription expanded the music industry. Audiobooks and podcasts followed the same pattern. Spotify says users spend two hours a day on the platform.
172. Spotify is eight times bigger than Pandora. They started in the same category. Spotify invested more in the product and pulled ahead by a factor of eight. The frame: digitizing is the entry ticket. Evolving the product is what wins.
173. Lotteries need enough options to sustain the entertainment. The categories lottery competes with for attention (streaming, sports betting, social) all offer endless variety. Lottery’s product variety has to compete with that variety, or the engagement window closes.

Jonathan Pauley, Loyalty Manager, West Virginia Lottery & Terry Dunford, Digital Operations Manager, West Virginia Lottery

Modernizing Loyalty Programs: From Transactions to Engagement Ecosystems

Pauley and Dunford walked through how West Virginia’s loyalty program shifted from transactional to engagement-led, and what changed when it did.

174. Most loyalty programs are transactional, leaving the player relationship emotionally unfulfilled. Pauley’s opening diagnosis. Points-for-purchases is the floor. The opportunity is to build a relationship that the player would value even if the points went away.
175. The bonus wheel mechanic gives players an emotional reason to come back. WV layered a chance-based reward on top of the points economy. The system captures the same data as a points-for-purchase model, but the player experience is more fun, and they engage more frequently as a result.
176. Always-on. Sustained engagement across the year. WV treats engagement as continuous, with reasons to log in spread across the year: anniversaries, holidays, safer-play education, surveys, and quizzes. The player has a reason to log in even when there’s no big jackpot.
177. $2.7 million given away in the 40th-anniversary calendar. Pauley’s stat for scale: more dollars given away than there are people in West Virginia. An innovative lottery using the calendar mechanic to create a year-long anniversary event.
178. Engagement drives 43% of WV’s scratch sales: 424,000 tickets and $5.3 million in value. 63% of engaged players play scratch. 63% of retail scratch-off ticket submissions come from wheel players. The program is reshaping the channel mix.
179. Engaged players buy 190 tickets per year. Non-engaged buy 120. A 58% lift in tickets per player among engaged members. The mechanic is delivering on lifetime value.
180. Safer gambling earns points too. Same playbook as Atlantic Lottery. WV rewards players for learning the responsible-play mechanics. Safer-play sits in the same economy as the entertainment.
181. Trips, cruises, cash. The rewards portfolio goes beyond vouchers. The redemption mix is part of what gives the program emotional weight.

Nicole Schaefer, Director of Media Channels, Allwyn North America & Richard Bowman, Senior Director of Analytics, Allwyn North America

How CRM-Driven Promotions Are Transforming Lottery Player Engagement

Schaefer and Bowman walked through Allwyn’s predictive-targeting playbook. The right targeting decision determines whether the offer makes or loses money.

182. Allwyn uses paid media surveys to find the people worth marketing to. The team runs targeted survey questions through Meta and other paid channels, then layers the responses into the segmentation model. The audience is built from declared preference and observed behavior together.
183. Message relevance drove a 6.5x lift in engagement. Same offer, product, and target. Headlines varied by segment. The variant tuned to a known interest got 6.5 times the engagement of the control. Personalization is the multiplier.
184. Sequential messaging escalates urgency. Up to three follow-ups. Allwyn’s flow for app downloaders who haven’t registered: an initial message, then three follow-ups, each more urgent than the last. The final message lands as “Last chance to get your free play.” The mechanic is well-known in commerce. Lottery is adopting it.
185. Predict whether a player will play. Then decide whether they need an incentive. Allwyn’s model scores individual players for likelihood to play. Player A scores 75%; Player B scores 25%. The creative the player sees is determined by the model score. The campaign brief sets the parameters; the model picks the creative.
186. Unlikely players redeemed a buy-one-get-one (BOGO) offer at 28.5%. The model said these players wouldn’t play. The BOGO converted them at a rate that produces higher ROI than a standard offer on the same segment.
187. BOGO works on the unlikely-to-play segment, where the upside is recovery rather than upsell. The same offer to a high-propensity segment would have been wasted.
188. Loyal audience upsell: great redemption rate, but ROI is negative. Allwyn’s honest reporting on the other side of the experiment. Loyal players will redeem; that’s why they’re loyal. But the offer they’re upsold on costs more than the incremental value it brings back.
189. The two-tactic playbook is the takeaway. Use BOGO and similar offers on the unlikely-to-play segment, where the lift is real. Don’t use them on loyal segments, where you’re paying for behavior you’d get anyway. The targeting decision determines whether the offer makes or loses money.

Melissa Juhnowski, Marketing Manager, Rhode Island Lottery

Black Friday: A Rhode Island Holiday Tradition

Juhnowski walked through “The Lot,” Rhode Island’s Black Friday event. Twelve years of a tent in a parking lot turning into the lottery’s most reliable holiday promotion.

190. Rhode Island Lottery has built “The Lot,” a Black Friday tradition, into a 13-fold sales growth event over 12 years. Sales went from $3,371 in 2013 to $44,380 in 2025. The format is a tent in the parking lot at lottery headquarters, sitting between two regional shopping hubs (Warwick Mall and Garden City), on Black Friday.
191. The original 2013 mechanic: holiday mugs with $1 instant tickets, greeting cards with instant tickets inside, numbered coins drawn from a stocking to determine the prize. Small, novelty-led, easy to staff. It worked because it tied the lottery into the muscle memory of Black Friday shopping.
192. The event has been refined every year. Customer choices got narrower at the point of purchase, which cut indecision. The setup moved to a tent in the parking lot, giving more capacity and visibility. Staffing levels rose. Barcodes were added to the back of the gift tags to speed validation. A freebies table appeared. Each year tightened the operation.
193. The current mechanic: prize values written on the back of gift tags. No peeking, no swapping. A wide range of prize values, with the most common tag at the lowest value. Tags are removed from the pile as they’re picked. The format is fair, fast, and easy to staff at scale.
194. Partners fund the prize pool. Much of the event’s popularity sits in the headline prizes. RI sets aside event tickets from existing partner contracts (Providence Bruins, theater tickets). Months ahead, the lottery reaches out to partners and retailers and asks if they’d like to contribute. The model is partner-funded prizing without a sponsorship deck.
195. From $3,371 to $44,380. A 13-fold increase in 12 years. The event compounds year after year.

Brittany D’Haenens, Senior Director of Marketing, Hoosier Lottery & Chris Shewmake, VP, Media & Digital, Cactus & Dustin Thompson, Senior Manager, Digital Marketing, Hoosier Lottery

Champions of Play: Giving the Gift of Play

Hoosier Lottery’s holiday playbook, presented by the in-house team and their agency partner. The frame: lottery shows up strongest in the part of the year when consumers are looking for shared experiences.

196. “Champions of Play” is the Hoosier Lottery tagline that anchors the brand across the year, and the holiday push. D’Haenens, Shewmake, and Thompson walked through the campaign. During the busy holiday period, consumers are looking for shared experiences. Scratch-offs have become part of that tradition. “The gift of play” works because scratch combines a gift, a moment, and a chance.
197. Three pillars: holiday tickets, experiences the lottery facilitates, and Hoosier players’ lives. The “Play is built into everything we do” framework runs across every brand touchpoint.
198. The holiday play season is three months. October seeds the season. The November push brings the campaign to mass media. By December the goal shifts from awareness to connection. The plan stages activity across the autumn instead of crowding it into a single launch.
199. The campaign landing page features a custom-built gift-giving machine. Hoosier developed its own digital game. Players design their own gift-giving machine, finding new components to add over the course of the campaign. Free digital games and second chance entries are layered into the landing page. The mechanic gives the player a reason to come back across the season.
200. The creative is built around “gifting intent.” “Give the Gift of Instant Fun.” “Give the Gift of Play This Holiday.” “Unwrap Instant Fun.” The creative system uses the gifting language consistently, putting the product in the part of the consumer’s mind that’s already shopping for gifts.
201. The campaign sits across paid and mass media, seeded with retailers. The play tradition extends beyond the lottery’s own channels. Working with retailers ahead of the season means the in-store environment carries the same message as the broadcast and digital push.

Neil Watson, Marketing & Communications Specialist, Nebraska Lottery

Giving and Getting: Twice as Nice Social Media Giveaway

Watson walked through a small-state holiday giveaway that has run every year since 2019 and continues to do its job on a Facebook-only distribution model.

202. Twice as Nice: when you win, your friend wins too. Watson’s holiday Facebook giveaway. Five winners each November. Each winner gets $100 in holiday scratch tickets for themselves, plus $100 in tickets for a friend they nominate. The Nebraska Lottery handles all the prize fulfillment.
203. The “for a friend” mechanic doubles the social reach of each win. Winners share the news with someone they know. The lottery gets two engaged customers per win, with no incremental media spend.
204. The promotion has run every year since 2019. Watson’s team has continued the playbook for seven years. The format works, the audience expects it, and Facebook is still the channel the Nebraska Lottery’s audience uses.
205. Facebook is the entry channel; the page is the host. Players enter via the Nebraska Lottery Facebook page. The page becomes the natural distribution point during the November buildup. The announcement of winners is a piece of content in itself. Owned social as the infrastructure, with no paid media buy required.

Kelly Cortez, Director of Marketing, Pennsylvania Lottery & Kara Sparks, Director of Products, Pennsylvania Lottery

Cash Pop Hits PA

Cortez and Sparks took the room through Cash Pop, the daily draw game Pennsylvania introduced in late 2025.

206. Pennsylvania introduced Cash Pop in November 2025. Cortez and Sparks walked through the design and the early results. Cash Pop is a daily draw game where players match one of 15 numbers. The mechanic is intentionally simple: “You only need to match one number to win.”
207. Four draws a day extend the sales day. Morning Buzz at 9:00 AM. Lunch Break at 1:35 PM. Prime Time at 6:59 PM. Night Owl at 11:00 PM. The draw schedule maps to natural moments in the day, giving the player a reason to engage four times rather than once.
208. 16% of Cash Pop sales come from the 9 AM draw. 18% from the 11 PM draw. The bookends do disproportionate work. Together they account for over a third of all Cash Pop sales. The mid-day draws fill in the rest.
209. 80% of Cash Pop sales come through self-serve vending. The game is built for the vending machine. Players don’t need a clerk to play, and the mechanic is fast enough that the player isn’t holding up the queue.
210. Multiple price points: $1, $2, $5, $10, $20. Higher stake means higher potential prize. Prizes are 5X to 250X the spend. Matching one POP at the right price point can win up to $5,000. The price-point structure lets the game appeal across casual and committed players within a single product.
211. Cash Pop appeals to a younger, more frequent player. The simplicity, the multiple daily draws, and the vending-friendly purchase fit a player who likes fast-cycle products.

Ammie Smith, Chief Product Officer, South Carolina Education Lottery

The Debit Advantage: A New Path to Sales Growth

Smith walked through how South Carolina’s debit card launch is tracking against the $128 million revenue model. The early read: the rollout is working, and there’s another $32 million on the table.

212. South Carolina Education Lottery modeled $128 million in new revenue from accepting debit cards. Smith walked through the launch. The model was built during the pandemic, when a branding survey showed how quickly contactless payment had displaced cash. The opportunity was clear; the question was the rollout speed.
213. One month from plan to launch. The team had a month to get ready for a July start, across several thousand retailers in the state. The compressed timeline forced the team to focus on what mattered and skip what didn’t.
214. Three launch hypotheses, two confirmed. First, that debit would drive significant sales increases. Confirmed, with the lift representing new money rather than cannibalized cash sales. Second, that interstate sales would increase. Not proven. Third, that Powerball jackpot runs would amplify the effect once the jackpot crossed $1 billion. Confirmed. The jackpot runs are visible in the debit sales data.
215. On track to meet the $52 million target for extra sales. A meaningful number against the $128 million model. The takeaway from the rollout so far: lean into the corporate retailers. The bigger chains are where the data is cleanest and where month-over-month traction shows up first.
216. Only half of SC retailers accept debit. The other half is the next $32 million. Bringing the remaining retailers into debit acceptance is the next lever. The economics are now provable, which makes the retailer conversation easier.

Marc J. Marseglia, Deputy Executive Director, New Jersey Lottery

Mobile Claims

Marseglia walked through New Jersey’s shift from paper-and-drawer claims to mobile, and the adoption curve it produced.

217. New Jersey Lottery’s claims process was paper until summer 2025. Marseglia walked through how NJ replaced a paper-and-drawer system with a mobile claims flow. Players now scan their winning ticket, and the lottery responds digitally. The regulatory frame stays the same; the operational reality is digital.
218. 22% of claims are coming through mobile, with no promotional support behind it. Mobile claims launched in summer 2025. The team didn’t run any promotion until November 2025. By the latest month reported, mobile already accounts for 22% of all claims, and the share is growing.
219. The retailer education gap is the next thing to close. NJ retailers don’t yet understand why mobile claims help them. The lottery’s argument: a player who can claim a small win by mobile doesn’t need to come back to the store to redeem, which frees up retailer time for new sales rather than backloaded paperwork. The opportunity now is to make the case to retailers more consistently.