Casino Enterprise Management

Blue Lake Casino is taking its unique advertising approach and applying it in a whole new way for a provocative ad campaign. It’s aimed at a younger demographic and has some of the casino’s regular (and older) players telling Marketing Manager Michael Laffey that he’s gone crazy. But the campaign is attracting the demographic it’s supposed to. And it caught our attention as well.

With slogans like “My pad or yours?” “Can I play with it?” and “Feeling a little slotty tonight?” this campaign is definitely what some would call tongue in cheek, and others outrageous.

The campaign includes billboards, print ads and television commercials that definitely push the envelope. The iSino campaign will also be hitting social media outlets including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. The commercials, aired during sporting events and shows like Jersey Shore, show a gorgeous 30-something man playing with something in his lap. Two stunning women stroll up and ask him if they can play with it. Viewers eventually see that the beautiful people are playing a casino game on an iPad™. The ads are edgy enough to catch viewers’ attention, make them laugh and spark curiosity about getting in on the action.

Laffey says he realizes this type of campaign would not work everywhere. “We probably wouldn’t be able to do ads like this in the Midwest. This is a California thing,” he says. As a Minnesota native myself, I have to agree.

The goal of the campaign is to get 25- to 40-year-old players in the door, specifically into the Kinetik lounge to play iSino™. iSino is Blue Lake Casino’s trademarked name for the true server-based Acres 4.0 system played on iPads. The lounge, specifically created for this new form of gaming, is the only place on the property where iSino is offered at this point. Laffey says, “This is the atmosphere the younger players are demanding, less smoke, less noise, more of a social atmosphere. With the iSino product, we see a lot of folks coming and ordering a bottle of wine on a date, then handing the machine back and forth and having fun together.”

Blue Lake will eventually have 52 iSino games. Laffey says he “flipped” when he first saw the product and learned of the opportunity he would have to launch it in his market. It didn’t take long for Laffey and the creative department to decide they wanted to embrace the technology and show it to a new audience in a new way.

John Acres says he admires the iSino campaign. I asked if this is how he imagined casinos would market his product. His answer: “Absolutely no and certainly yes. I never would have dreamed of this sort of ad campaign, as it does not speak to me personally. But I always imagined that, when done properly, the iSino gambling product would be targeted at consumer groups I had not imagined. So by doing what I never imagined doing, iSino does exactly what I'd always imagined a good marketing campaign would do.”

Laffey and his team dreamt up the campaign by forcing themselves to think like 30-year old men for a week and find a direct way to make them laugh. Laffey recalls: “We really wanted to throw everything that we normally do out the window and really start from scratch and say, ‘If I was a 30-year old male and it’s a night out, what are the things I’m thinking about?’ What are they doing when they’re out in the club? What do they look for in any entertainment choice? Honestly, we reviewed a lot of the Super Bowl commercials because they’re going after the exact same crowd.”

The campaign has been running since May, and Laffey says it’s too early to analyze results. But he uses an increase in play and a few anecdotal results to prove the campaign’s early successes.

Laffey says he’s getting exactly the type of verbal feedback he’d hoped for: “The 25- to 40-year olds are telling us when they come through the door, ‘That’s funny, I had no idea you could play on an iPad! Thanks for introducing us to the product.’ Then some of our older folks are like, ‘Wow, you guys are crazy.’ But we’re in Northern California; we are all a bit crazy here. So we’re absolutely fitting in with who our target guest is.”

One welcome, but unexpected, side effect of this campaign is a noticeable increase in the number of bachelorette, bachelor and birthday parties that are reserving the Kinetik lounge for a night. Laffey says the lounge will host two to three private events a month now. He admits, “I would have never in a million years thought that a group of 30 ladies having a birthday party would want to come to that atmosphere, play the games and have a good time, but then have it be private.” 

The iSino campaign is a prime example of Blue Lake’s commitment to providing choices for a wide range of age demographics. Laffey says Blue Lake is perfectly happy with its current guests, with an average age of 59 years old. He likes providing this core group with something new, and adding younger people who also enjoy the atmosphere.

This topic is one that Laffey and Acres have spent hours discussing. As Acres says, the mainstream casino customer is aging out. He continues: “Attracting a new customer demographic is expensive. Not attracting a new demographic is fatal. While we certainly welcome play from all age groups, younger players have the greatest long-term economic value. Without them, we cannot exist.”

The leadership team at Blue Lake gets it and is on a mission to cater to a new crowd, while continuing to please its existing players. Encouraging 30-something men to “Let ‘em play with it” is definitely a new approach, even for a casino in Northern California. But it appears to be working and Laffey hopes it will inspire others to push the envelope in their own way.

Sarah Klaphake Cords is the New Media Editor for Casino Enterprise Management. She can be reached at editor3[at]aceme.org.