THE CANARY – PART TWO
CI: Will this work under GDPR in Europe? RH: Absolutely, Europe is ahead of the US in terms of privacy standards for advertising and as mentioned earlier, the key technological issues associated with privacy are cookies, IP addresses and third-party data, which we are not reliant on. We get email inquiries from consumers regularly asking what information we hold on them. Time and again, we reply with the same response – ‘sorry, we have no idea who you are, we don’t hold any personal identifiable information, and we have no information about you!’ Our AI doesn’t need it. It’s a paradigm shift in what people are used to – advertisers
traditionally target a person: the who. Inuvo only cares about the possible reasons behind a user’s online actions: their why. We built a company for the future of consumer privacy, not the past.
CI: Say for example someone comes to your site, looks at your opening times, then goes and looks up vegan recipes – how is that reported to you, Carlton? How does the interface and reporting work on the user side? CS: My experience is twofold; I have a lot of faith in Inuvo, so I have empowered them to use some discretion with how we spend our digital advertising dollars. If they begin to see movement toward vegan, we will consider placing more digital ads in places where vegan may be a point of interest. Also, we get a monthly report and there is a mishmash of things on it – or it seems like a mishmash until you dial them in. The list went from duck hunting, golf, sports betting, candle making, and then the vegan signal started to show up increasingly and in real time. This gave me operational insight – something that’s a value-add for this sort of spending. It doesn’t work this way with traditional media. But I got insight from their advertising that told me to make an operational change on the property before it became a lost opportunity. We met with Food and Beverage and asked them to come up with some meat-free dishes and we were off to the races. All of that came about from this monthly report. Again, I don’t want to say Vegan is our secret weapon – it’s not – but it’s a clear example of this technology’s value. RH: Carlton makes a really important point there. One of the things that makes our technology so revolutionary in comparison to the old methods is that our AI finds the why, not
Carlton Saffa, Chief Market Officer, Saracen Casino Resort
Saffa currently serves as Chief Market Officer for Saracen Development LLC, the holding company which owns and operates the Saracen Casino Resort and its associated enterprises. Saffa oversaw the licensure of the enterprise in all forums, including the property’s casino gaming license. In addition, he served as one of the owner’s representative in the construction of the Saracen Annex, a 300 slot machine facility which was completed and operational in 100 days. Saracen’s main property was developed in parallel, which in phase 1 encompasses a 200,00 square footprint, including 2,000 slot machines, a sportsbook, 7 restaurants, a poker room and a sportsbook. This project was the largest one-time tourism investment in state history and the largest construction project in Arkansas in 2020. Previously, Saffa served as Senior Advisor to Governor Asa Hutchinson, work which began before the Governor’s inauguration. In this role, Saffa handled complex and controversial issues on behalf of the Governor as well as coordinating the passage of Hutchinson’s priority legislation.
the who. Those looking to run campaigns against the ‘who’ are using third-party information that is limited to what is available in those consumer databases. It really doesn’t materially change all that frequently and certainly is not in real-time. Our tech doesn’t do that, it is an adaptive technology that can identify any one of 25 million possible reasons why an action is occurring in real-time.
CI: Is there the potential to use this on-property, not just getting people in-property? It feels like it could be used to help learn about player movements within a resort and be used to refine on-property marketing. CS: That is something that I have plans to discuss with Inuvo. I have no doubt the capability is there. Arkansas was a virgin territory in terms of gaming with two legacy operators who had done very well, many hours apart, for three million people. My experience has been that the aggressiveness with which they pursued carded play was not what you would see in other markets. We have been aggressive in player acquisition with carded play. My carded play is good. We opened with a small slot house in October 2019 and the main facility opened in the middle of COVID in October 2020. My database is good, but I only have eleven months or so of data really. It’s not the book I will have a year from now, but it’s a lot of people. My primary focus right now is to just get people to visit. That’s because the experience at this property is so distinctly different from the modified casinos of the legacy operators that I know once you’re here, you’re going to fall in love with the property. My charge to Inuvo was, find out who’s coming, what they like, and help me get more people to visit. We are always at work to increase our carded play, and that’s a double-edged sword because your reinvestment goes up with the uptick in your carded play. That’s a great problem to have and something I consider a champagne problem. I’m not at the point where I’ve been able to have the
conversation with Inuvo about turning my player’s club network into something we can maximize for even more play – that’s the next step. My first goal is still happening, to get more people through the door. It’s working – we continue to set records and reset the bar.
Rich Howe, Chairman & CEO, Inuvo
Richard Howe is an accomplished entrepreneur, technology executive, and board member. He received a Bachelor of Engineering from Concordia University, where he graduated first in his class and a Master of Engineering from McGill University, where he was a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council Scholar. His business successes have included building multi-million-dollar startups, running billion-dollar corporations, merging public and private companies, acquiring strategic assets, reinventing technology businesses, and developing high performing teams across three continents. Rich is a patented inventor having specialized in machine
learning, analytics and big data technologies that have addressed problems in marketing, fraud detection and risk management. He was Chief Strategy Officer at the Acxiom Corporation, a marketing technology information processing pioneer, and a member of the team at HNC Software that commercialized neural network-based technologies that are used to this day across North America for the prevention of credit card fraud.
36 OCTOBER 2021
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