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Better, Smarter, Faster: How AI is Transforming CDPs
Key Results at a Glance:
Scientific Games is a 100% lottery-focused company, serving 32 lottery programs around the world with everything from product development and analytics to marketing and loyalty-program support. Its work spans printed and digital games, engagement programs, and web and mobile products, including more than 900 websites launched, and over 15 million mobile app installs.
The company's growth marketing team specializes in helping lotteries optimize their programs online, using the player data now flowing from known-player accounts to drive more personalized marketing than the industry has ever been able to attempt. Scientific Games has partnered with Optimove since 2018 and has launched more than a dozen state lottery programs on the platform.
Lotteries are unusual advertisers. They have brand equity most companies would envy, a retail footprint in every neighborhood, billion-dollar jackpots that generate their own word-of-mouth, and deeply loyal players. What they do not have is room to waste any marketing dollars.
Three constraints sit on top of that reach. The first is data. For most of a lottery's history, the business ran on anonymous retail purchases, so known-player accounts were never a priority, and the systems that would tie a player's activity together often were not built to talk to each other. The industry has advanced toward a true 360-degree view of the player, online and offline, but some lotteries are starting that journey late.
The second is compliance. As government agencies, lotteries operate under a level of legal and regulatory scrutiny few consumer brands ever face. Layers of review can slow the adoption of new technology and constrain what marketing is even allowed to do.
The third is budget. Lottery marketing budgets are typically modest, often set outside the lottery itself, and small next to other forms of entertainment competing for the same attention.
Put those three together and the path narrows to one option. A lottery cannot outspend the competition for attention, so it has to out-target them.
That means using first-party player data to reach the right people at the lowest possible cost. It is precisely where most lotteries have had the least capability.
Rather than tackle the problem one lottery at a time, Scientific Games built a forum for solving it together. The SG Digital Academy was launched in partnership with Optimove and Meta to give lottery partners a place to try new technologies and learn from one another. It is a unique arrangement made possible by the fact that lotteries do not compete with each other. A strategy that works in one state can be shared openly with the next.
The Academy's first project ran for six months, a paid-social media-buying program with five state lotteries. Each ran the project with its own products, budgets, and digital strategy. The unifying thread was the data. Every campaign drew on first-party player data, flowing through the Optimove and Meta integration and turning CRM segments into precisely targeted social audiences.
Two features of that integration mattered most. Audiences refreshed automatically every day, so a player always saw advertising matched to where they actually were in the lifecycle, an improvement over lists built by hand. The player data was also hashed before it ever reached Meta, a detail that for a government entity under strict compliance scrutiny was mandatory.
That combination is what the industry's structural gap had been waiting for: a way to use player data for precise, low-cost targeting without compromising the security rules a lottery has to live by.
The project ran in three phases: measurement, planning, and execution.
Measurement. Measurement came first, because nothing could be optimized until it could be tracked. For each lottery, the team implemented the Meta Conversion API and set up event tracking through Meta or Google Tag Manager. They also established the Optimove and Meta integration for the four of five lotteries that did not already have it. The Conversion API was a Meta best-practice recommendation. It builds a more reliable connection between a lottery's marketing data and Meta's technologies, which improves ad targeting, lowers cost per action, and sharpens tracking.
Planning. The team hosted a discovery workshop with each lottery, then analyzed its market and its player data. That picture showed where the testing opportunities were and became the basis for a roadmap. Working alongside Optimove and Meta strategic services, the team also ran training and best-practice workshops on creative, ad placement, and messaging. Every lottery started from the same standard rather than learning by trial and error.
Execution. Execution was where the segments went to work. Together, each lottery and the team chose which player segments to target. Most began with acquisition, using high-value player segments to build custom lookalike audiences on Meta, then moved into retention. Because the audiences refreshed daily through the Optimove integration, each test stayed current as it ran.
Across the five lotteries, the project delivered up to 20% higher reach, up to 31% more registrations, and up to 60% lower cost per result. The gains arrived test after test, from one lottery after another, over the full six months.
Pennsylvania shows what that looked like in a single program. As a real-money gaming state, its lottery ran both an acquisition and a retention test.
For acquisition, the team built a Meta lookalike audience from Pennsylvania's highest-value players and ran a welcome offer featuring a progressive jackpot game. Against the control, the test group delivered a 60% lower cost per first-time deposit and a 42% higher conversion rate. The welcome-offer series had been running flat; this was the project's first test, and it worked well enough to keep.
The retention test isolated creative. To the same high-value segment, the team ran a premium, VIP-styled ad against the lottery's usual mix of general messaging and stock photography. The premium creative lifted average deposit by 19% over the general creative, raised future value by 13%, and grew total wager by 34%. It carried no offer at all. The lift came from how the message looked and who it reached, not from a discount.
“Every time a test completed and we saw the initial results, we got excited. It was a constant loop of great results coming in from different lotteries.”
Jessica Fritz, Senior Manager of Digital Growth Marketing at Scientific Games
The gains were not confined to the numbers on a dashboard. For the lotteries themselves, the project changed how they understood and reached their players.
“Our collaboration with Scientific Games and their Optimove CRM system has been a game changer in targeting high-value players and refining our understanding of the player journey. Optimove enabled us to construct a detailed user journey, reaching new audiences through lookalikes built on our existing Hit Five players. It delivered a nearly 15% boost in engagement, with notable lifts in ad recall, click-through, and time spent on our educational landing page. The support from Optimove has helped shape how we design our user journeys, setting a new standard for future campaigns.”
Gina, Senior Media Planner, Washington State Lottery
The lottery industry's constraints have not changed. Budgets are still modest, compliance is still strict, and player data is still hard to assemble. What changed is that Scientific Games stopped treating those constraints as limits and started treating them as the reason to be precise.
First-party player data, moved securely through the Optimove and Meta integration, let five lotteries compete on accuracy instead of spend. And because lotteries do not compete with each other, every test that worked in one state became something the next could use.
That is the part worth copying. Use the data you already have to target better than a bigger budget can, and share what works.
To get even deeper insight on Scientific Games watch this podcast from Optimove Connect:
In it, Optimove Director of Sales Peter Miles and Scientific Games’ Jessica Fritz, joined NEXT.io editor Conor Mulheir to explore the evolving landscape of customer relationship management (CRM) in the online lottery sector.
To learn more about how Optimove helps marketers turn first-party player data into more efficient acquisition and retention campaigns, request a demo.
Better, Smarter, Faster: How AI is Transforming CDPs
