Social mobility: Inside Foxwoods' new social casino platform

Foxwoods plans to leverage its new social platform to drive customers into its brick and mortar casino, but how? EGR NA caught up with four executives from Foxwoods and Greentube to find out

When the interactive arm of Foxwoods Casino was created in 2008, its initial purpose was to prepare for the anticipated regulation of real-money gaming (RMG) in the state of Connecticut. However, regulation failed to materialise. As such it found itself partnered with Game Account Network (GAN), a real-money casino provider, in a market where only free-to-play casino was allowed.

Predictably the partnership didn’t work out and the two officially went their separate ways in 2014, although Foxwoods didn’t announce a new platform provider for more than a year. After a rigorous bidding process it opted for Novomatic subsidiary Greentube, with its web and mobile casino platform designed “from the ground up to be social”.

The new Foxwoods online social casino was launched in late April and around one month after launch, EGR NA spoke to some of the key players in the deal to find out how it was made and what a successful return would look like.

Q: What was the deciding factor for Foxwoods in choosing the Greentube platform?

Frank Pracukowski (FP), director of administration at Foxwoods Interactive: We were looking for a system that would help us find new players, help us retain current players and reactivate players that haven’t visited us in a long time.

The biggest reason we moved forward with Greentube was the maturity of its offer engine. Every social platform talks about convergence marketing but when we sat down, a lot of them couldn’t provide us with actual details.

They talked vaguely about offers that would drive online players to offline and vice-versa, but Greentube had something exceptional with the offer engine where we could target specific players and send them targeted offers in real time to drive them into the casino to redeem those offers.

Kenny Huang (KH), CEO of Greentube’s social arm, Bluebat Games: The idea is to match the player with an offer from Foxwoods. So at the minute we’re doing rewards/loyalty points which can be converted into experiences at the casino likes buffets or a free night’s stay. What sets us apart is our ability to match segments of players to certain offers. We treat VIPs like VIPs for example – we’re not going to send them a coupon for a free breakfast.

The offer engine is the foundation. Yes, you can make money from selling virtual currency but this is primarily a marketing platform for us. There’s also additional marketing channels alongside the offer engine, like example videos or banner ads, so there’s different ways for Foxwoods to market and message various bits of their database.

Casinos have a lot of trouble getting information to their customers. But by having customers come onto your site daily to play, they have a chance to watch live video and earn coins for doing that. From my perspective we’re still at the very beginning of exploring the power of this.

Q: So this is a marketing tool first and foremost?

FP: If you look at other platforms providers, their main goal is to sell virtual credits and then work out a revenue share deal with the casino. That’s great for them, but our main driver is to get additional business and new players into the casino and we feel the Greentube platform does that better than anyone else on the market.

As a large land-based casino, one of our main focuses is to synergise digital and land-based services. We want to get our customers interacting with us more often, letting them earn rewards points so when they do come, they get a better experience.

Q: How are you marketing the online casino itself?

Eric Pearson (EP), VP of gaming and revenue enhancement at Foxwoods Resort Casino: We’ve done external digital marketing, but no radio, TV or billboard yet, although that’s in the works. There’s a real heavy advertising presence around the property and we have a robust direct marketing programme. All of the snail mail and email we’ve been sending out has mentioned Foxwoods Online with bonus offers on there.

Part of the reason we haven’t done the big external ad campaigns yet is because we really wanted to focus our efforts on where we see the biggest early gains, which is activating the database. The platform is definitely ready for the big time launch.  If I felt like it wasn’t ready for primetime I wouldn’t expose it to the database because that’s one of our biggest assets.

Q: What has been the initial focus for Foxwoods Online?

EP: We’re only a few weeks in so a lot of focus has been on activating our existing database, and specifically re-activating long-inactive members.

We’ve also had good feedback on what game types are working and that’s already helping us in our discussions with land-based slots providers, we can tell them with more accuracy what we want to bring onto the floor based on what’s working online. Once we’ve got those games in we can also email those players and invite them to come play on the floor as well.

Q: How has the social casino influenced decisions on the casino floor?

EP -It’s certainly been useful in terms of tracking since we can monitor which games players are interacting with. That’s where being an integrated operation is different to being online only. We are able to find out where our high-value customers are spending their time on site, what kinds of games they are playing and what might they be interested in.

A lot of our focus is on finding that synergy between what we are seeing online and taking advantage of that data in the casino. We’re building a lot of that stack right now. Perhaps we have high value customers online who don’t come into the casino for some reason. We’re still learning how we can convert them.

Q: What early feedback are you receiving from customers?

EP: We’ve had tremendous feedback from players who’ve got onto the site and I’ve been very pleased with the adoption we’ve been seeing. I don’t know if we want to come out with hard numbers yet but it’s exceeded my expectations and our daily traffic numbers were higher than they were on the old platform already. The transition was very positive – we’re one month in and far ahead of where we were expecting to be.

KH: When you have a transition it’s harder than launching afresh because there’s already certain player expectations and you’re going to take away some of their favorite games.

There’s also an adoption period with any social game. They need 30 to 60 days before players start to trust the game and platform and before you start to build a relationship with players. During that time we’re constantly working on new features and new content to keep the site fresh and keep customers engaged.

Q: What percentage of your customers are interacting via mobile?

EP: It’s about 50/50 compared to where we were before, which was 85% desktop. That’s great to see that mobile penetration, and to more than double that in under a month is very exciting and shows our players are very engaged.

The main benefit of a strong mobile product is the ability to communicate directly with guests wherever they are. I believe the apps have really helped adoption. Having a play-for-fun site that is desktop-focused is very seasonal because in the summer people aren’t using their PCs on holiday, whereas they always have their mobiles, so I’ll be interested to see the impact in the coming months.

Q: Although it may be secondary for Foxwoods at this point, how are you going to monetize the virtual currency aspect of the platform?

EP – We went out with an aggressive campaign to push conversion which involves a lot of bonuses, credits and free coins so customers could explore the site and get into it, so we knew we wouldn’t be generating big revenues from virtual currencies from the outset. We believe in the platform and we don’t want our players to have to pay to discover it. Making money out of this is something for the long haul.

Q: How important was it to make the platform look and feel like Foxwoods?

Gabriel Cianchetto (GC), Greentube’s president of market development NA: Foxwoods was looking for customisation on the front end and the back end. On the front end we spent a lot of time on the UX and the UI. Foxwoods has spent hundreds of millions of dollars building its brand and we wanted to reflect that as best as possible to the player. We spent a lot of time inside the casino, just walking around and soaking up the atmosphere to get that feel.

Our competitors’ sites all look the same. You swap out colors and logos and they’re the same. And that’s because they were all built to be real-money platforms. They forgot about brand, whereas we were trying to extend the brand from offline into online. That cookie cutter kind of site might have worked previously but we think a social casino has to be an extension of the brand because it’s not just a game, it’s an acquisition tool.

Q: How would Foxwoods react if Connecticut ever legalised real-money gaming?

GC: Well it’s important to note that social casino and real-money casino are two completely different platforms. You can’t just flip a switch and turn a social platform into RMG or vice versa. That was part of the problem with our GAN platform. They’re two completely different lines of business and meant to do completely different things with your players.

For example, at Greentube we have a B2C platform called Gametwist and we do real-money in regulated markets in Europe but that’s completely separate to Bluebat, our social arm. The Bluebat team are from gaming companies like EA. They’re about gamification rather than gambling

We have different marketing, technology, and support teams for the two disciplines. For example, with a social casino you can send out invites to play through Facebook Connect, you can send coins to your friend and that’s stuff you simply can’t do with RMG because you have to have your regulation hat on.

EP: We would absolutely continue to have a social casino platform if RMG became regulated in the state. There’s a market for both because what you can do is so different. The perfect example is the UK, where social casino is still massive despite existing alongside the most competitive gambling market in the world.