Casino Science
Leading Data-Driven Innovation for Casino Marketing

One are those days when casino operators could generate significant financial returns even with little marketing expertise. Today, players are promiscuous and hold divided loyalties between multiple gaming venues. This creates hyper-competitive local and regional markets.

In the face of this competition, casino operators realize that the only way to survive is to use data as a strategic asset. Data is the key today to acquire player wallet share from competitors or increase the share of wallet from existing players. As a result, computational techniques are being used to look at large volumes of data at a scale. There are new and novel algorithms that can be constructed to make structured and unstructured data meaningful. Now, it is significantly easier to create models that allow a casino marketer to answer questions: what is the right segmentation to apply to the player database?; what is the right number of segmentation tiers and players?; how will future casino promotions perform ahead of their execution? This opens the door to other types of optimization problems like defining optimal free play offers across player tiers or determining an algorithmically efficient reinvestment strategy—which is precisely what Casino Science excels at addressing.

Founded in 2016 by Azam Husain, Casino Science is a data science and analytics solutions company working with tribal and commercial gaming enterprises across the U.S. and Canada. “We offer managed data services, direct mail and player rewards automation, and slot floor optimization. We use data, math, and machine learning capabilities to help marketing and finance teams streamline existing casino operations and generate greater revenue,” says Husain, CEO, Casino Science.

Casino Science’s services two key areas. The first one is custom data science services designed to help marketing and finance teams accelerate insights from casino data. The services are highly customized and delivered through consulting engagements. To better explain the value proposition of this offering, Husain emphasizes on the company’s work with direct mail automation for player rewards programs. These programs are fundamental to the way casinos operate today. There is a common misconception with casino direct mail marketing: the more promotions you send to a larger audience, the higher the response rate. Although this may seem logical, the reality is far from true. Sending a promotion to a larger sample of players does not necessarily generate a higher conversion on-property or return on investment. Husain explains, “Over time, as players receive multiple messages, they become reluctant to respond or just interpret the message as junk mail and noise. To this end, it is essential to send relevant and targeted messages to smaller subsets of the player database.”

In such a scenario, casino marketers need to segment their player database into more manageable groups addressing the different needs and requirements of the target audience to drive greater on-property spending and conversion. “Casino Science direct mail automation identifies those players who will respond to the appropriate message based on data signals that we analyze from player behavior and spend.

This work relies on the fundamental premise that someone who recently played, played often, and spent is more likely to respond to your next marketing promotion than someone who played a long time ago, played infrequently and spent next to nothing,” says Husain. With direct mail programs—where every contact comes with production and shipping costs—targeted lists not only help with more focused promotion communications but also reduces the cost of running the promotion.

The second area of focus resolves around packaged services that entail Casino Science Business Intelligence and slot floor optimization. The former allows casino marketers to review summary player data and trends, build player lists, slice and dice player data, run campaigns, and measure promotion results. The latter offers a radically different approach to managing and configuring the slot floor.

A large portion of capital expenditures rests in the gaming products on the casino floor. Understanding the right mix of machines and game types to invest in is important for a casino. Based on years of academic research, the Slot Floor Optimization solution was created to help clients with this function. The solution can also optimize the spatial arrangement of machines on the floor to produce a floor configuration that generates a greater financial return. “What makes us unique in our space is that we are a solutions company in gaming where our value is measured in the insights derived that lead to some impactful change,” prides Husain.

Casino Science’s goal is to empower its customers with data narratives that can lead them to the right types of recommendations and decisions—which is truly different from a traditional software company whose goals are more aligned with selling additional units of software licenses. Such an approach has helped the company establish itself as a leader in the U.S. and Canada while enabling them to enter the Australian market. And for Casino Science, the word “leader” goes beyond just market domination; they genuinely strive to make the difference or be the difference. For instance, during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Casino Science produced and delivered a free webinar series to collectively bring casino operators together for sharing ideas and best practices. They also developed the Workforce Healthcare Tracker—a frictionless mobile solution— to track sick employees at the employee entrance or anywhere on the property. The solution tracks temperature and symptoms and can schedule medical follow-ups automatically through a healthcare payor or provider. At present, this offering has been deployed at several casinos within the U.S.

In essence, Casino Science’s approach to business resonates with an old saying, “there is nothing more beautiful than someone who goes out of their way to make life beautiful for others.” With everything that’s going on in the world right now, companies like Casino Science could perhaps be the ones to introduce a paradigm shift in the enterprise arena where passionate individuals and businesses work together for the greater good of the industry