The Las Vegas Strip is iconic in our industry, with so many big-name resorts that are synonymous with both gaming and Vegas itself: Bally’s, Caesar’s Palace, MGM Grand, The Venetian. Many of the resorts are household names, while others are less well-known. So how do the ‘less well-known’ casinos compete? How do they keep their customers, find new ones and thrive in this incredibly competitive stretch of real estate? Marketing Director David Koloski spoke to Casino International about his role for Harrah’s.

Casino International: What does being a marketing director of a couple of Strip properties actually entail? Who are you marketing to?
David Koloski: Our job is to figure out and incent customers to visit us and that’s through all sorts of channels. As a marketing person, I have to work with our department directors and people in advertising, public relations, entertainment, special events – which are the slot tournaments that we run and table tournaments – to bring your best customers in, to incent them to bring an incremental trip back to our property. Direct mail, our loyalty mail and now we see Total Rewards, so it’s really trying to profitably influence customer behaviour, and do it in a way that gets customers to want to come back, because we want to, we love having them here obviously and we want to make sure that when they come here they have an experience that is up to the standard that they expect. And part of that is obviously not only delivering it to get them here, but also once they’re here to make sure that we deliver on a proposition that we offer.

CI: How do you incentivise with existing customers? Do you do any local marketing?

DK: Well I think you have two questions there. One is just how we incent our customers to show up, and then two, geographically, where are they from. We incent customers, there’s two forms of customers. There is your rated customer, which are customers who have a player card or a Total Rewards card, and then there is a customer that is unrated, or a retail customer, which is someone who doesn’t have a Total Rewards card. And we have both, obviously, because the average person just likes to come to Vegas and enjoy a weekend and have fun with their friends, who isn’t a big gamer, may not have a Total Rewards card, but they’re just as important to us as a customer who has a Total Rewards card and getting them back and playing with their card. So there’s two forms of marketing to two different segments. From a rating standpoint, the way we really talk to our customers is our ability to monitor data. What makes Total Rewards great is that we can take the data based on how a customer plays and player tracking and  create models and systems that enable us to segment customers in a way where we can truly provide them the exact offer they want at the exact time that they want to get it, to incent them to come back when they want to come back. That’s always been our strategic, competitive advantage, segmenting our customers who are rated.
From an unrated standpoint, the normal sort of everyday person who has just come into Vegas or any property just to have some fun, that’s really done through advertising, public relations, who get the word out. It’s all about awareness, how can we get customers to know that the Imperial Palace exists on Strip, and it’s a great place to go. Entertainment’s another great way, it gets the word out about the property. “I’m in town, Legends is here, I should go.” “That’s a great show, maybe we should stop by and check it out.” So there’s two different forms. You’ve got to think about it from two different perspectives; what our rated customers want, and how do we incent them to make incremental trips to our property, and then what the retail customer wants, and how do we get the word out about the Imperial Palace or Bill’s to convince them to stop by our place when they show up.

CI: You’re in a great location, but the competition at that end of the Strip is pretty fierce, because the destinations around you are enormous. Does that level of competition make your job more difficult?
DK: It’s not really that it’s difficult, it’s just because there are many different types of retail customers. There are the customers who are willing and wanting to have an experience at the Bellagio or Caesar’s Palace, and then there’s a type of customer that wants a different experience, and that experience could be something that they find at Imperial Palace, a little bit more casual, comfortable experience than they might see at Caesars Palace which is a little more upscale. What’s great about the Imperial Palace and Bill’s is that there’s a niche that exists that we can market to, because there’s a lot of people who come to Vegas who want to have a great time in Vegas, but may not be interested in trying to handle the overwhelming, and granted fabulous, but overwhelming experience at the Wynn or Caesar’s Palace or the Bellagio, because it’s just intimidating to them. So it’s our belief that we have a nice niche, and location is a big part of that because they can be in the middle of the Strip and touch and feel all these other great experiences all the other properties provide, but they know they can always come back to their sort of, the casual, comfortable place that they’ve known and loved for years.

CI: Bill’s is just  a couple of doors down the Strip from the Imperial Palace. What are the key differences between the two sites? What are the different identities of the casinos and how do you distinguish them to customers if you’re marketing both?
DK: The biggest difference is the physical size. Imperial Palace has about 2600 rooms, Bill’s has about 200. So when you think about how you market the two properties, the size alone dictates what you do. I can’t, at Bill’s, go out and focus on bringing in all our rated customers all at once because we don’t have enough rooms to handle them all. So the way Bill’s grows is really all about getting people in off the street who are walking by because it’s a great location, and convincing them that there’s interesting stuff going on inside as they’re sort of walking from hotel to hotel, which we know all Las Vegas visitors do. IP, since we have more rooms to play with and we can market and be much more aggressive in terms of reaching out to our rated customers and sending out room offers, for example, to fill up our hotel. But at Bill’s, I can almost fill up the hotel with people just walking in, because it’s only 200 rooms. So the scope alone really dictates how you market it. The upside of Bill’s is all about the walk-in traffic. The upside of IP is both.

CI: If you’re looking after the marketing for both sites, is there any dual marketing?
DK: Yes. A great example would be if we have a slot tournament this weekend and it’s a special event, we will invite Bill’s customers, where they will stay at Bill’s and come play at IP. And we do that so the Bill’s customers are able to take advantage of all the great things that the IP is able to offer to them, and to our good rated customers that they can’t get at Bill’s simply because of the size. Bill’s is not a place where you can do large, 1000-person slot tournaments. Physically, the space just doesn’t exist. So we are always working, or always sending out offers to Bill’s customers that they can get at the Imperial Palace for special events, et cetera, to again incent trips and provide them with an experience that they may not be able to receive.

CI: How do you quantify the effectiveness of your advertising or whatever to the ‘unrated’ players?
DK: We can track, basically, every channel in terms of room bookings. So when we do an internet deal with Expedia, one of the third party sites, we know right away how many people book very quickly, and that ranges across all the marketing channels. If we do an advertising special in a newspaper, well we can track that too because they’re going to call and book under that advertising special.
From a play standpoint, an actual gaming revenue standpoint, you can kind of back into it. If you know how much the gaming revenue is for your rated and you know how much your total is for the month, you can figure out how much your unrated was or your retail play and see if that was in the area which you were hoping to achieve. But everything is trackable. The lines do get a little blurry when you’re talking about things out there like advertising and how effective is advertising from a direct standpoint, how much impact does advertising directly have on customers, it is always a question. But there are a million measures that you can take to give yourself a directional sense.

CI: Is Total Rewards Harrah’s-wide, including, say, the London Clubs properties? Are acquisitions immediately brought into the Total Rewards fold?
DK: Every property is looked at, and people much smarter than me make the decision of whether or not a property should have Total Rewards or not. Conceptually having Total Rewards in a property makes sense because reward credits are transferable. So if I were playing St Louis and I earn reward credits I can use those reward credits in Vegas or any property that has Total Rewards. That’s what makes the programme so great, is you can earn in one place and redeem in another. Conceptually it always makes sense to have Total Rewards.

CI: Does Total Rewards make the marketing job easier, as it presumably flags certain player behaviours or attributes to you?
DK: Yeah, no absolutely. With any player tracking system whether it’s Total Rewards or anything, you obviously have built in mechanisms that tell you if a customer is a great player and they’re on the floor, let’s make sure we go and talk to them, or based on how they play and what they’re playing in, we’ll be able to segment them and say, well this person really likes to play video poker, and we have a video poker tournament coming up, now we should send them and offer for that. So yes, there’s automation from a mining standpoint, but it’s not just a computer that tells us how to market to our customers, there’s always a sniff test, there’s always making sure that what we think the data is saying is interpreted correctly and then we behave appropriately.
We have flexibility in everywhere we market to our customers. So what works at Imperial Palace from a special events standpoint, or from a direct mail offer standpoint, may not work at Flamingo, so Flamingo does something else that’s more tied to what their customers want, because they may have a different psychographic customer than the Imperial Palace has. What’s not flexible is how you earn your reward credits, although the rate at which you earn your reward credits is a standard across the board.

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