Casino Marketing in the Age of Persuasion

You are here >

For advertising information, please contact
Richard Swayze

Marketing - Archives
Casino Marketing In The Age Of Persuasion


		Leave a comment

What makes a great ad? Who better to ask then the man who has made some of the best in Canada. Terry O’Reilly is best known as host of The Age of Persuasion, a weekly half hour CBC radio show on advertising. In advertising circles, Terry’s better known for his award-winning advertising work as co-founder of Pirate. His long list of credits includes work for Canadian casinos like Casino Rama and Fallsview Casino which, O'Reilly admits, is work within a subject he loves: “It’s a very fun category to work in, because they’re selling fun.”

Behind the fun is careful thought to developing the right strategy. Just as you have a lot of choices on how to spend your marketing dollars, the audience has a lot of choices on where to spend their entertainment dollars. As O'Reilly suggests, there’s a strong role for branding among your advertising messages, noting: “A great branding campaign will bring that casino to the forefront and get a lot of attention. If the idea is memorable, well executed and smart — if all those tumblers fall in place then at least you’re on the audience’s radar. If they think about taking a long weekend or doing something unusual, your chance to be near the top of that list is greatly enhanced.”

Getting attention is what great branding can do. Advices O'Reilly: “If you subtract advertising from the mix, it’s pretty tough to get your word out there. If you’re not doing major brand advertising then you’re relegated to some of the tougher aspects of marketing, which is telemarketing or junk mail. You’re doing that kind of tough, tough legwork. Brand advertising is about trying to define your product or your offering in an unusual way to position it against other things in your category, to position it against other ways people can spend their dollar.”

That difference is fun. Or put another way, the excitement of being at the table, the excitement of the crowd, the big name acts, the buzz. “It really is the excitement that you’re selling, you’re not just selling a game of blackjack you’re selling the experience of going to the casino.”

So, what makes a great ad? According to O'Reilly, it is: “One that sells. Truly. First and foremost one that makes the cash register ring — that makes a great ad. And then I think if you just back up from there, you have to attach a great idea, a great selling idea to a product.”

As for what that idea entails, O'Reilly adds: “A great selling idea has to do a couple of things. First and foremost, it has to get attention because you can’t sell anything to anybody unless you’ve got their attention.”

Surely, Getting attention is critical – but don’t stop there. Simply getting attention without tying your message back to the Casino is just a gimmick. We’ve all seen some hilarious commercials but soon afterwards, although we remember the joke, we can’t remember who the commercial was for.

“Many times I feel that’s a broken strategy at work,” notes O'Reilly. “The creative is obviously doing the right thing, it’s getting a lot of attention, it’s being passed around, but an ad is only as good as its basic strategy, and the strategy has to be meaningful. Also, the strategy should give you a really good link to the product. If that link is weak, if it’s not meaningful, if it’s peripheral, if it’s just selling the category and not the product as a rule, it’s because the strategy is weak.”

And the strategy is the other piece of the puzzle to creating great ads; presenting the product in a meaningful way. Says O'Reilly: “It has to frame the product or service in such a way that it’s memorable and it makes you feel there’s something unique about that brand. And lastly, it should ask for a call to action. It should very easily tell you what the next step could be, either to pick up the phone, get online or get down to the store. Those are really the steps of a great ad, a creative selling idea that gets attention, frames the product in such a way that there’s something memorable about it and lets people know how they can act on it.”

So now you have the secret, all you need are ideas! You can catch Terry O’Reilly on the radio, or pick up his book, The Age of Persuasion.

By David Bellerive, Phoenix Group