Summary

In this episode, Nick and Dan catch-up with Noah Acres, Principal & Chief Operating Officer at Acres Manufacturing. Learn how the company's CMS platform, Foundation, leverages modern architecture, state-of-the art hardware, and a growing collection of analytical and promotional applications to redefine customer acquisition and player marketing. Also, hear how the company's data acquisition and analysis is forcing it to completely rethink the reinvestment logic of traditional player development programs. Also in this episode, layouts based on customer segmentation.

Transcript

Nick Hogan:

Morning, Dan. How are things in Vegas today?

Dan Cherry:

Morning, Nick. They’re great. How are you doing? I know you guys are in the midst of a historic heat wave next couple days over there, so hopefully everything’s good.

Nick Hogan:

Oh, man, it is boiling hot over here. So we’ll hit 32 Celsius. I got 93 Fahrenheit today and it’s supposed to go up a few points tomorrow, and remember, no air conditioning, right? So we have to deal with this. Also, Dan, I forgot to check in with you regarding your World Cup favorites. So considering that van Dijk, Gakpo and Gravenberch are all Liverpool guys, I assume you’re an honorary Dutchie. Is that the deal?

Dan Cherry:

Oh, I don’t know. For you, I am. Sorry. They can’t see, but I don’t have my orange on today, but I’ll get it next time, Nick.

Nick Hogan:

Okay. So, who are you backing?

Dan Cherry:

Oh, I don’t know. There’s so many good… I mean, honestly, for the first time ever, the US has actually got a chance to make a run here. Not saying they’re going all the way.

Nick Hogan:

They do not look all that bad.

Dan Cherry:

But everybody’s pretty excited about that, but there’s a lot of folks in the running, right? France, Argentina seem to be the favorites.

Nick Hogan:

Yeah. Yep, yep. We’ll see where it goes. I’m just hoping that Mbappé will completely ensure that Messi never gets on the record book for closing the tournament. I don’t like that guy.

Dan Cherry:

Yeah. Everybody over here has been spending their time watching YouTube videos of random Dutch and German folks experiencing Buc-ee’s and Texas barbecue and all kinds of stuff. So, US culture is expanding. It’s great.

Nick Hogan:

There was a shot in Houston of an orange river. I mean, it was so many thousands of people walking around. So yeah, they’re pretty good about visiting their team well abroad. Okay. Dan, we have a great listener question on which both of us would like to opine a bit and we have an awesome guest here today. So, I’m going to skip the news section part today and just plow straight into the question. Before I do, let me say that we’d love to tackle any questions that anybody listening may have. So if you have a question about what we’re presenting or something you’d like us to present, please drop us an email at reelcast@reelmetrics.com. Again, that’s R-E-E-L-C-A-S-T at reelmetrics.com. Our policy is to keep all questions anonymous, so please speak directly and don’t worry about us revealing your identity. That’s not something we do.

Dan, this comes from an operator in Nevada who asks, “Hi, guys. I have a question about floor layout. We’re discussing a new approach where we group slots by customer segment. We would have hosted player zones with their favorite games, grind zones with junk games and everything in between. In your experience, is this an effective approach? Do you know of casinos that have tried this and failed? If so, what did they do wrong?” So, many thanks to listener for that question. I love not only the content there, but also how you phrased it. Dan, I’ll toss in a few points here, then turn it over to you if that’s all right.

On that first question now, is this an effective approach? The answer is a highly enthusiastic yes. I would say it’s the approach. In fact, ReelMetrics has spent a ton of time and money creating market basket apps that facilitate this approach precisely. We’ve seen plenty of operators implement this successfully, and indeed, I do know a few who blew it. I would say what’s critical here is that you’re selecting products based on proven resonance with specific segments and not potential resonance. What would be the difference there? I would say that whereas proven resonance is arrived at quantitatively by studying consumption trends by segment, that potential resonance is arrived at qualitatively by reviewing designs and par sheets and speaking with AEs and things of this nature. So if you focus on proven, it’s going to succeed. You focus on potential, very decent possibility it won’t. Why not? Because those qualitative choices, they just contain too many assumptions and opinions on what drives resonance.

I guess what I would say here is forget the designs and the par sheets, really study that player, the player preferences, find out what they like, cluster that product by segment and then very importantly, make sure you have enough of everything. So you want to keep that core occupancy dialed in around 40%, premium 65 to 70. If you want new stuff that you don’t know about, you can just go to our real hot index, which you can find at cdcgaming.com/reelmetrics, which does everything that you need there. So the resonance is broken out by segment and then we have that ISR metric or inner segment resonance, which will show you those that appeal to multiple segments, and therefore need to be placed in larger quantities. So that was kind of my two cents. Dan, I know you have a lot of thoughts about this as well.

Dan Cherry:

Yeah. No, I think it’s a great question. I feel like it’s a question that in different shapes or forms keeps coming up over the months and we’ve talked about from a few different angles, but I think it’s the question every operator has on their mind, that it’s where everybody’s trying to get. I’m just a simple operator, so I’ll give the operator perspective here. I think a lot of folks have had success in different avenues here, right? So the basic, the listener said, hosted players, right? To me, that’s the easiest, and whether that’s a technical data-driven approach or whether that’s just listening to your host team, listening to what players are talking to