MRI Casino Marketing Blog
AIM to Make the Most of Your Database

Marketing Results Incorporated has long been at the forefront of data mining. Our president, Gary Border, has been collecting data since 1980 – back when casino polls were conducted from clipboards. Now that MRI’s Advanced Intelligence Marketing^® software is launching its fourth commercial version, I sat down with some of our power players to discuss which updates the different departments are most excited about.

Craig Border, VP of Database Marketing, spends most of his workweek using AIM^® and is certain that campaign development is significantly easier. “Now we can build fifty or more segments into a marketing matrix. A marketer can fine-tune adjustments on their local computer, then export the updates back into AIM^®. This enables marketers to work independently from the IT team. Having immediate access to the data lets marketers react quickly to competitive changes.”

Another benefit is the ease with which managers can monitor their hosts. Personal interactions are often hard to measure, but now they can set up clear objectives for their team, and hosts can track their performances against the outlined goals. “We’re honing in on an ideal reinvestment structure,” Craig said. “Most casinos don’t have a way to view this data, and if they do, the information isn’t in the hands of the marketing department who’ll know what to do with it.” With AIM^®v.4, all of these different tiers are sorted every imaginable way, and each is secured with its own authorization and permission levels. The information is ready as soon as you need it. “Say you’re at a meeting and your bosses—the owners, the board of directors, the general manager, or whoever—asks about the database. All you need to do is click a series of checkboxes and you’ll have the answer before the meeting’s over.”

Ed Tolleson, our company’s IT Director, says that casinos are the main drivers of the software’s improvements. “They’d come to us saying, ‘wouldn’t it be beneficial if we could data-drive this aspect of the business?’ The answer was always, that’s a great idea. Some of the changes were just a matter of waiting until technology caught up with our vision.” For example, reports are now built automatically, and changes are saved into the cloud. “Where the previous version needed users to queue up data and wait for the numbers to crunch, [AIM^®v.4] distributes requested data as soon as it’s available, so the reports will be waiting in their inboxes when they get into work in the morning.”

Everyone was unanimous in their opinion that the biggest difference between AIM^® and other casino marketing technology is that MRI uses it. Every month, MRI is managing marketing campaigns for 20 or more casinos. We’re testing and learning about the current trends at a rate twenty-times faster than the average casino. “We don’t need beta sites. We are our own beta site, so we know for a fact this functionality is useful,” Gary said. “These are ideas that we’ve been developing and improving on for years.”

AIM^® accelerates the learning curve and lets casinos shift with it. For the past thirty-five years, Gary’s been a constant catalyst for the industry’s advancements. He says, “In the past, a lot of decisions were based on assumptions using ADT—the Average Daily Theoretical win. Now we’re crunching real numbers, and the results register immediately as soon as you click the button. For decades, these decisions had been predicated on opinion, but we’ve gotten to a point where we’re able to base them on facts. The game is always changing. Change is the only constant, but we don’t have to be reactionary any more. We can see the changes coming, which is a luxury not a lot of industries can claim.”