39 PUBLIC GAMING INTERNATIONAL • MARCH/APRIL 2026 what does it cost to obtain a customer, what does it cost to keep a customer, what behaviors do we reward, and how best to allocate limited resources? When we respond to competition, we should be clear on whether we are retaining our core players, attracting new players, or chasing customers who may never be “ours” no matter how much we try to win them over. Considering these questions pushes us toward a more sophisticated understanding of player motivation. Why do people spend money on games-of-chance anyway? Why do they choose instants over draw-games, or casinos over sports-betting? Or skill-style devices, or even “gray” machines? It would appear that the lines between “chance,” “skill,” and “entertainment” are blurring as well. Three people can do the same activity and have three different motivational responses because humans are complicated. So, we should apply as much insight to the process of evolving the games as possible. You’ve emphasized partnerships and collaborations, with retailers, with major brands like the NFL, and with our lottery counterparts in other states, as representing a huge opportunity to innovate, inject more value and impact into our marketing and promotional initiatives, and deliver more value to the players. What do modern collaborations do for lotteries that the lottery couldn’t do alone? B. Rockey: Partnerships and brand collaborations allow lotteries to express themselves as modern consumer brands, and to do it at scale. The industry has made real progress here. Years ago, game groups were asking a narrower set of questions: how do we optimize performance? Do we adjust the matrix? Do we grow jackpots? What does research say about player behavior? A lot of that work was necessary and valuable. We already knew that when jackpots get big, existing players play more and occasional players come in. But we learned that promotions and experiences can matter just as much as jackpot size for certain segments. Lotteries have long been good at in-state promotions, and vendors have helped create effective campaigns. But the evolution now is larger: we’re building relationships with major brands: NFL, NASCAR, and high-profile national moments like New Year’s Rockin’ Eve programming. The key is multi-year commitment and refinement. If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing long enough to learn it, improve it, maximize awareness with repetition and consistency, and get a real return on investment. Association with these major brands is conferring legitimacy and unlocking new windows for how lotteries can be seen. There’s an old expression about “the company you keep.” It’s true in life and it’s true in branding. Mainstream brands that choose to partner with you are signaling their respect for your brand to the public. They’re telling their own fans that your brand is “like one of us”. If you like NASCAR or the NFL, then you’ll probably like lottery too. The industry is unlocking the incredible value that Brand Lottery brings to these collaborations. There’s the retail connection that no other operator can replicate. There’s the foot traffic and point-of-sale visibility. There’s lottery’s broad awareness and trust built over decades. There’s the intrinsic value of our mission to serve the public and billions in beneficiary impact. There is the massive scale that includes hundreds of thousands of retailers and tens of millions of consumers. Affiliation with Brand Lottery delivers incredible value to our collaborators. The days when lotteries sold themselves short are over. We need to act less like a product category and more like a massive public enterprise with brand equity, distribution power, and a unique value proposition. Now, the more we monetize our real strengths, the better we negotiate, the better we partner, and the better we tell our story. As NASPL president, what are you doing concretely to tell that story outside our own lottery world? B. Rockey: One of the things I’ve tried to do is expand the venues where we tell that story. We’ve had NASPL leadership at the Council of State Governments conference. Simply showing up, making relationships, working the room and figuring out how we can have a bigger voice on future programs. We’re engaging with audiences like NCLGS and similar policy-adjacent forums. And we’re continuing to look for platforms where the lottery story belongs because it intersects with public administration, public finance, retail economics, entertainment, recreation, consumer products, and probably a lot more. For example: we’re participating in the American Society of Public Administration conference with a panel of lottery leaders. That’s a room full of academics, researchers, and public administration professionals, which is exactly the kind of audience that benefits from understanding the history and structure of lottery as a public business. It’s also a room we can learn from. That’s the kind of two-way exchange we should be pursuing. Another example is our relationship with retailers. The lottery is still deeply anchored in retail, and that will remain true for the foreseeable future. People still buy fuel, food, and everyday goods in physical locations. We should engage with national retail trade groups like NACS and the National Retail Federation, just as we engage with our respective local organizations. My goal is to create a steady cadence. At least monthly, we should be doing something that extends our story beyond our industry: panel discussions, programs, media engagements, retailer events, policy forums. Visibility and understanding matter in a world where perceptions shift quickly. And that’s the bigger strategic point: we should be thinking not only about freshening products, but about elevating what “lottery” means, so that it connects emotionally and culturally to something larger than jackpots. The “Coca-Cola moment” that makes us want to “teach the world to sing in perfect harmony” is really about meaning: what do we stand for, what’s our “why,” and how do we communicate it in a way that resonates with modern audiences? We exist to produce public benefit. We just have to learn to express that “why” with the same sophistication and creativity that top consumer brands use. Because in the end, the question isn’t whether the world is changing. It is. The question is whether lotteries can adapt while staying true to their mission, and whether we can do it in a way that keeps us relevant, trusted, and strong for the next generation of players. I believe we can. But we have to be intentional. We have to tell our story. We have to learn from other arenas. And we have to treat relevance as a discipline, not a hope. n “This Isn’t Your Father’s Oldsmobile”— continued from page 12
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