GoGo getgets lotto machine giant as ad partner

October 11, 2011 by Dave Haynes

The lottery business has long been seen by business development guys as one of those sectors they’d love to crack the code on, and win some business – for the simple reason that lottery points of sale tend to be counted in the 1,000s, not the dozens or 100s.

One of the ways in would be through the vendors already working with lotto corps – notably the companies that make and sell the machines that spit out tickets all day long.

There’s word this morning that GoGo Cast Inc. of suburban Providence, Rhode Island has worked a seven-year partnership with lottery machine maker GTECH Corporation, of downtown Providence, R.I., to offer ad screens as an option to customers.

The deal would “put GoGo Cast’s dynamic GoScreensTM video screens and advertising platform in highly-trafficked lottery locations in mutually agreed-upon U.S. lottery jurisdictions. GoGo Cast and GTECH plan to offer GoGo Cast’s digital out-of-home solutions to GTECH’s lottery partners in the U.S. GTECH currently services approximately 145,000 lottery retailers nationwide.”

“The GoGo Cast solution provides an excellent advertising platform for some of our lottery customers and their retail partners, and also serves as a perfect complement to GTECH’s existing Enterprise Series MultiMedia digital-messaging displays,” said Alan Eland, senior vice president and chief operating officer for GTECH North America, in a press release.

GoGo Cast describes its Go-Screen network as “flexible programming and promotional advertising tailored to specific markets, customer segments, and day parts. The sophisticated GoGo Cast platform provides scheduling flexibility that allows programming to be segmented into multiple day parts, making it possible to promote specific items at times most relevant to customer purchase patterns.”

“With this agreement, our vision of creating and managing the largest nationwide ‘Retail’ Television Network can be realized. GTECH will utilize GoGo Cast’s extensive customer and location data to create streaming lottery content tailored to retailer locations in U.S. jurisdictions in which the parties agree to deploy the GoGo Cast solution,” said David Paolo, president and CEO of GoGo Cast.

Interesting.

GoGo Cast has been building up a footprint in the c-store sector for the last year or so, most recently announcing a deal with Gulf Oil back in May. Certainly,c-stores and gas stations are where you will find most lottery machines, so there is a fit.

It’s likely the proposition here, to GTECH and the state lottery corporations, is that GoGo will put their gear in for free and do a revenue split. GTECH is just a supplier and can’t do much more than make an introduction and co-market this offer. It’s up to the lottery people to decide if that interests them, and it is a big open question whether they would surrender screen time to soda and chocolate bar advertisers.

While the Digital OOH in c-stores vertical is certainly seeing media booked into it, the pie is pretty small and being cut up furiously. The amount of money a lottery company might see, per store, after revenue splits would be skimpy.

My frame of reference is Canada and the two biggest digital signage networks in this country, run by the Ontario and Quebec lottery corps. Neither does third-party ads and they don’t even use third-parties for the back-end software. The screens they put in are there to drive lottery tickets and other games like scratch and win cards. And that’s it, that’s all.

So while there is a theoretical opportunity to get this out to 145,000 retailers, the actual number will be a (likely small) percentage of that.

What this does is give GTECH an answer if the ad revenue comes up with a US customer, and a bit of a sweetener to their pitch to sell the “wagering terminals” or other gear … as in, “work with us and our partners will put in screens for free.”

The announcement with GoGo Cast comes several months after a digital signage software  announcement with NCR  NetKey, that had GTECH rolling that POS company’s technology offer into its product line.