Combine IGT PlayDigital’s diverse game portfolio featuring premium iGaming content and technology with an engagement platform created to enhance loyalty, reactivate players, and increase overall player life with agile and easy-to-implement solutions, and what do you get?
Andrew Bonnici, Vice-President of Platform and Analytics for IGT PlayDigital, is convinced the answer is a game plan for success.
“The advanced suite of engagement tools that we have developed over the years and packaged into a unified portfolio of tools is designed to enhance the player experience,” Bonnici said. “A multitude of engaging mechanics varying from jackpots, cash play tournaments, leaderboards, prize draws, raffles, free rounds, VIP jackpots, and award quests are available.”
Marketing promotions can be set up on any game with any RTP enabling an increase in promotion scale and real-time information with automated promotion tools and capabilities.
“The mechanics and features that we have designed are implemented into the player experience,” Bonnici explained. “There is a framework which sits on the games. We refer to this as ‘widgets’ with which players interact. The widgets are fully configurable, customizable, and brandable according to the customers’ needs and requirements.”
IGT PlayDigital’s global presence in the North America, LATAM, and EMEA regulated markets commands a giant footprint with a complete omni-channel casino and that includes its award-winning premium iGaming content and technology.
Bonnici emphasized the value that player engagement is driving for IGT PlayDigital’s customers, especially when combined with top-performing content that makes it even more valuable.
“We are trying to generate value for the operator by having mechanics in place that can really drive the engagement of the players,” he said. “Ultimately, we are trying to raise and generate value and experience for the players themselves.
“It is a win-win scenario any way you look at it. It is obvious the players are enjoying themselves more. They are partaking of all the mechanics. They are engaged, and operators are actually seeing uplift in traffic and increased engagement by the players.”
The promotion automation platform IGT PlayDigital brings to the market creates personalized promotions for each customer, with real-time data and expert promotion analysis. Building better game experiences for players and markets by utilizing data-driven solutions from the company’s global, holistic analytics and reporting platform is also key.
“We sit down with our customers to understand their needs,” Bonnici said. “We want to know what they are trying to create as an experience for the players. We support them through the set-up and configuration prior to the live launch of the platform.
“We start by understanding what the customer’s target is, what they are trying to drive, what are the engagement metrics that they are trying to hit. We also try to understand the make-up of their player base, the size of it, the flow at which points of the week they play so that we can cater the promotion and make it very custom for them.
“All the way up to the promo we ‘handhold’ the customer into the testing and set up of the configuration. We usually do everything for the customer at the start. The goal is for them to buy into and understand the product enough so that it moves into self-service mode.”
Bonnici said that a full analysis of the promo is provided to the operator. IGT PlayDigital has dashboards internally which are constantly being monitored, including all of the transactions that occur during the promotion.
From a data perspective, the uplift and the engagement with the players can be evaluated, such as which components of the promo they engaged with more and which widgets they interacted with.
“We do a full spectrum analysis for the promo to help the operator, but also for us to understand how the tools are working and if they are working as we had hoped they would,” he explained. “During our sit-downs with our customers, we have received extremely positive qualitative feedback across the board.”
He said that there are customers in Europe that are running promos across the engagement platform the year ‘round because they believe that it is an integral part of the player experience that they provide.
“This is not a finished product,” Bonnici emphasized. “What we have brought to the market is something that we are absolutely happy with, knowing it is at the cutting edge of what is being offered across the industry. But we also have a very strong vision of where we want to take the product.”
He spoke about a backlog of ideas of how IGT PlayDigital wishes to update some of the features and the mechanics within the product, while at the same time remaining focused on the concept of personalizing the mechanics for the players and understanding what the players want, knowing that they sometimes want specific rewards based upon their personal preferences.
“We have ideas of how we want to offer rewards based on these player preferences,” Bonnici added. “We want to unify and create a seamless experience for players. For example, creating a standalone unified widget whereby the player can access all of the information about the promotions that they are partaking in, including knowing if there is a hot jackpot coming up or a big prize drop in the next 30 minutes.
“We have big plans ahead,” Bonnici concluded. “Going into next year the idea would be to continue leveraging the engagement platform to bring our network promotions that operators take part in to the next level. Our goal is to expand this branded, very clear Play Digital experience.”
