Helping creating industry leading campaigns and positive brand association with Bally’s

Problem

For years companies in the online gaming sector have been targeting problem gamblers to help regain control and stop harmful behaviors. Bally’s, a leading international online gaming operator, wanted to go beyond industry standards of responsible gaming and get a better understanding of the full player journey and trigger points. Ultimately helping customers make better decisions and be more responsible about their play.

Solution

Bally’s partnered with us to help develop a multi-brand, cross channel, responsible gaming campaign.
We designed a three stage research approach that included a deep dive into the business considerations of responsible gaming with key stakeholders at Bally’s, and a comprehensive qualitative stage to understand the full player journey – carefully curated tasks to observe consumer behaviour, avoid rationalised responses and unearth feelings and behaviours that players didn’t even know they had. This led to a stakeholder workshop where the research findings were used to brainstorm what is required to make a responsible gaming campaign more relevant to players. Across the project we overlaid key behavioural psychology models on addiction and decision making frameworks to really understand tipping points and risk and reward trade-offs at each stage of the player journey.

Impact

Before the research players felt bombarded with different messages and weren’t really sure which ones were appropriate for them, the cognitive effort was too great and so the messages were ignored, particularly when they were in a ‘hot state’ of play.
By looking at problem gambling from a different perspective, the research established that a preventative approach among responsible gamblers who don’t have the foresight to know that they are at risk, would be a lot more effective than waiting until it is too late and targeting people who have already developed a problem.
The new insights into player behaviour led to the development and launch of a campaign in 2020, aimed at driving behaviour change by using more preventative responsible gaming tools, with a particular emphasis on session reminders and time spent in play.
The campaign has become an integral part of Bally’s communications, it has already proven to have had positive results and is being used to help establish new industry standards, and has led to a 20% uplift in players setting deposit limits. The work has also had a demonstrable impact on the Bally’s brand with 59% of players in 2020 feeling Bally’s act more responsibly than competitors.

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