Advanced Casino Solutions’ (ACS) founder Scott Stokes said his company stands at the forefront as the premier provider of intelligent marketing and customer-engagement solutions tailored exclusively for the gaming industry.
ACS’s innovative products, coupled with actionable insights into customer behavior, empower casino marketing teams to propel player acquisition, foster development, and enhance omni-channel engagement.
“Our passion for innovation and unwavering pursuit of excellence drive us to deliver solutions unmatched in the industry,” Stokes said. “When you encounter applications ‘Powered by ACS,’ rest assured that you’re employing innovative solutions meticulously tailored to your unique requirements, igniting expansive growth for your enterprise.”
ACS, founded five years ago and now based all over the world, has 30 employees. Stokes, a software developer, is a 20-year veteran in Silicon Valley startups. ACS started as a data-science and analytics business for the gaming industry and considers itself a disruptor in the marketplace, enabling partners to execute with the information they need.
“I quickly pivoted us from a data-analytics and data-science business to an application and execution engine,” Stokes said. “I saw gaps in this industry. As the tribal gaming industry has expanded, it’s become more competitive. With that in mind, the holy grail is really your competitors’ database. Everybody protects that very closely and what we did through COVID was develop cool software that enables our partners in both marketing and player development to identify their best and most likely customers. It also identifies what their customer loyalty patterns are today and engage them.”
ACS’s platform is called Precision Insights & Engagement (PIE).
“We do 25 billion to 30 billion mobile-device observations on a daily basis and hundreds of billions on a monthly basis,” Stokes said. “We have about 95% of the United States population in our database, which enables us to observe and extract visitors to all of the resort casinos in the United States, Canada, as well as overseas in Asia, Australia, and Europe. In a matter of minutes, we can identify and enable the recency, frequency, and more than 200 demographic characteristics for every one of those individuals – age, gender, income, education, occupation, home address, email, and phone number, as well as their digital ad IDs to digitally advertise to those individuals.
“We find out who the casino goers are, how often they go, how recently they’ve been there, their favorite places, and their loyalty patterns for all of their given markets,” Stokes said. “We can identify how many times a patron goes to each of the properties (in their area) and enable our partners to launch omnichannel marketing directly to them by placing digital ads on their mobile devices, tablets, and smart TVs.”
Stokes said they do that while cutting out the middleman, thus reducing costs for partners.
For patrons on inactive lists for six or more months who are active at other nearby properties, they can launch campaigns “with the right people and the right offer at the right value to draw them back in,” Stokes said. They can do the same with customer acquisitions and the ability to gain more trips.
ACS Chief Operating Officer Tyler Bain said what sets the company apart is they’re Silicon Valley technologists who understand what technology should look like.
“The gaming industry isn’t normally on the cutting edge of what’s out there and one of the challenges of the industry is that it’s been insulated against other pieces of technology, like CRM and how everyone is jumping on the AI bandwagon,” Bain said. “ACS engineers come from a technology-based background, so they can bring outside thinking to do things right. They’re not from the industry doing things the way the industry has done, but doing things the way they should be done.”
Getting a 10% response rate on a multi-channel campaign of those who are inactive “is unheard of and casinos are making huge amounts of profit using our platform” by identifying those customers, Bain said.
It depends on the campaign, but Stokes said the lift can be 30% to 41% higher response rates than other channels. Additionally, the players they draw in are 30%-plus higher in value than the ones they’re sourcing through other avenues in customer acquisition campaigns.
“The quality of players and the commitment of the players they have show that we’re finding real gamblers that we’re able to identify,” Stokes said. “One of the things we can identify, in southern California for example, is varying stages in their lives based on income levels, net worth, when they purchased their home, and what their equity in it is. We can create different segments than what a typical casino is used to. We can find high-value players based on ethnicity, education, home type, and income levels that maybe on paper have low reported income, but they have heavy cash businesses for our partners that they would never otherwise locate.”
“We have so much data that can aggregate and we have a deep bench on the analytics and data science side of business,” Bain added. “We’ve gotten to the point where based on demographic, psychographics, and actual behavior, like shopping patterns, we can classify what players look like before they ever get to the casino and understand who are the best people to spend our partners’ ad dollars on to get the best return.”
Stokes called AI the “buzzword” in the casino industry over the past year and how everyone is on the bandwagon but questioned whether there has been any “true AI” in gaming.
“We take psychographic data, not only on behavioral patterns on property, but off property, and combine it with demographic data to create triggers and events for things to occur for our software to make informed recommendations to marketing and player-development teams,” Stokes said.
ACS offers a white-glove experience with managers assigned to every account, executive sponsors, and digital marketing teams, Stokes said.
“We have an entire team that optimizes budget, spend, and impressions and serves the ads to the best possible media locations to get the best outcome,” Stokes said. “We meet with all of our partners on a weekly basis and have the staff to support it. This company lives and dies on the success of its partnerships and we create very strong ones.”
The company’s tagline is “Igniting Success,” because they’re invested in the outcome, Bain said. Other tools in the market provide information like foot traffic, but don’t let operators do anything with it, he added.
ACS builds sophisticated marketing audiences that resort- casinos couldn’t do without their technology and empower them to engage with those individuals in a short period of time.
“Igniting Success is taking action and sometimes it’s hard for casino marketers to take action. Those that do benefit from partnering with us,” Bain said. “Our technology and innovation allow you to do things better. Our goal is to empower partners through innovative technology that makes transformative change and leads to successful results for our partners.”
ACS serves tribal and commercial casinos. It also advertises globally and digitally for one of the world’s largest cruise lines and travel agencies.
