EDITORIAL: If we all pull together as a team
by Charles Anderer
January 11, 2013
As we head into 2013,
more than a few hyper-competitive slot markets are looking like the gaming
equivalent of Woody Hayes football: three yards and a cloud of dust.
I’m dating myself because
when’s the last time you ever saw dust on a football field? This is a point of
sadness to me because dust can lead to mud, and there’s nothing I like better
than sitting in the comfort of my living room watching guys mate with mud. But
times change, as we all know.
Philosophically, Hayes
was a slow and steady kind of guy, unless you happened to run into him on the
sidelines late in life with an intercepted Art Schlicter pass, which could get
tricky. Incremental gains, wearing the opponent down, teamwork; all of that. In
competitive business situations, you could do worse.
Today, slot managers are increasingly
dependent on information, which is generated by technology and runs through any
number of departmental filters. Many work in organizations that are good at
gathering data and working to get better at translating that data into
actionable intelligence. This is grunt work, more like looking for needles in a
haystack than silver bullets, but it’s the only way forward. Nobody is growing
simply by putting new games on the floor anymore.
On the
business-to-business communications side of things (which is what we do), we
have been addressing slot technology issues at conferences for many years, and
I’m afraid we haven’t always followed our own advice about keeping current.
But, based on feedback from some valuable friends in the industry, we are
taking our Gaming Technology Conference (www.gamingtechnologyconf.com) in a new direction this March; one that I think will
benefit anyone who attends.
Rather than focus on
topics such as slot systems, networked gaming and project management, we are
focusing on the technologies that power marketing. Social media strategies, getting
connected and staying connected to your guests and mobile and Internet
marketing will be a focus. But what we’re really excited about is sessions that
seek to bring together speakers from multiple departments; here are a
couple:
War Room Analytics – An Exercise in Real World Problem
Solving
Making the most of data analytics is a process-driven team
effort. Predictive analytics expert Andrew Cardno will lead this session, which
takes you inside a typical gaming operator “war room” discussion of how to
transform data into real business gains.
The 1st Annual CIO / CMO Roundtable
From the early days of database marketing, marketing has
depended on the information technology resources of the organization to house
the data, maintain the data and at times assists in extracting and segmenting
the data. We have come a long way since the days of the AS400 and Microsoft
Access queries, and today, in some organizations, marketing and information
technology have direct or indirect reporting relationships. This lively panel
discussion, of industry CIOs and CMOs, led by software analytics visionary,
Christy Joiner-Congelton from STICS, will explore the dependencies and the
partnerships that have evolved and how they continue to strengthen and
capitalize their relationships.
We are putting this
conference together with the help of Claudia Winkler of GHI Solutions, whom
many of you know, and the response, in terms of confirmed c-level speakers from
marketing, IT and operations, has been great. I encourage you to check out the
website and to join us at the Green Valley Ranch March 12-13. It’ll help you
play a better brand of football. Promise.
Charles Anderer
is executive editor of BNP Media Gaming Group and also oversees content development, sales and marketing for the company’s trade shows and conferences, which include Bingo World, Southern Gaming Summit, Gaming Technology Summit, New York Gaming Summit and Casino Marketing. He can be contacted at andererc@bnpmedia.com.
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