Morgan + Company

Doubling Down with Island View Casino Resort

Gone are the days when Casinos were a place just for blackjack and roulette. Today, Casinos are expected to be luxury resorts with top-shelf bars, 5-star dining and an endless array of star-studded entertainment. With such high expectations, Island View Casino Resort was seeing less than effective results from its advertising efforts and turned to Morgan + Company to right the ship.

After a review of their past efforts, we determined that, like most gaming entities, Island View Casino Resort had relied too heavily on competitive research, basing the entirety of their marketing strategy on what their competitors’ were doing. The result was a myopic focus on reaching Adults 45+ in print, broadcast and out of home. This approach was fine for filling seats at slots but failed to take into account the four separate and distinctly different products (The View Bar, Gaming & Promotions, Hotel, and three restaurants) that actually encompassed the company’s brand.

Because visitors who came for the nightlife at The View Bar were different than those who came for dining at Emeril’s Gulf Coast Fish House, we needed to create a more sophisticated approach to marketing with the goal of leveraging the experiences of each product within the brand. To do so we segmented the core audience groups and identified “sweet spots” for each of the four products.

We generated “Lifestyle Maps” and psychographic profiles of these audience clusters and provided a much more intimate understanding of who Island View’s audience was and how to strike up a conversation with them. This approach also allowed them to develop and rotate multiple creative messages so that each product could better connect with its distinct audience.

• Fast food fits my busy lifestyle (14+ times/30 days)
• Willing to experiment with different brands
• Enjoy shopping with children
• Drink Budweiser or imported beer
• Drive an SUV to support my active family lifestyle

Armed with new audience insight and customer segmentations for each of the four distinct products, we were able to build a communication plan that spoke to each audience on their own terms. Not to mention the fact that having a far less general audience segment than the previous adults 45+ assured that campaigns were advertised in the best mediums, day parts, channels and programs for their specific demo and gave us the ability to prioritize and optimize messages by market. At last, Island View Casino Resort found themselves with a marketing strategy that was anything but a gamble.