Enhancing the Casino Guest Experience with Digital Display Technology and Content
Why casinos need to focus on the guest experience.
Casinos operate in a highly competitive market, and to maintain their edge and maximize profitability, it’s essential to provide a differentiated experience that causes casino guests to stay longer, return more often and act as brand ambassadors off-premises. Digital display technology and content are highly effective tools to help accomplish those objectives.
The key is engagement. Casinos use LED displays, digital signage, IPTV, and other technologies to enhance the casino guest experience in three powerful ways:
- To facilitate the guest experience by providing visitors with essential information
- To promote the guest experience by highlighting available amenities
- To enrich the guest experience by increasing the perception of luck and winning
With the right technology partner who has up-to-date knowledge and an essential understanding of gaming environments, the possibilities for creating a truly remarkable casino guest experience are endless.
How casinos use digital display technology.
From LED signage that turns your entire property into a billboard, to the ticker displays in your sportsbook, digital display technology can take many forms. Just as important as the technology itself is the content it displays. Custom-created graphics can bring a casino’s overall brand to life just as effectively as they can alert a room full of casino guests to a jackpot on their vicinity.
An easy way to appreciate just how flexible and powerful this technology can is to look at applications inside the property, outside the property, and how they work together to create a unified casino guest experience.
External Digital Signage
1. Building Signage
Whether you’re building a new casino or want to bring fresh excitement to an existing one, imagine transforming the structure itself into a canvas for communication. Alpha has created multi-story exterior displays that announce the casino’s presence to viewers several miles away.
Enhances the guest experience by: Communicating the excitement and scale of a world-class casino resort experience.
2. Marquee Signage
Marquees are an iconic way to communicate excitement, and today’s LED versions are sharper, brighter and more flexible than ever. They become magnets to draw guests inside and alert them to the casino property’s amenities.
Enhances the guest experience by: creating a powerful sense of arrival and informing visitors of amenities that will enrich the casino experience.
3. Directional Signage
Digital display technology can facilitate entry and egress, especially at large properties with multiple entrances, parking facilities and casino guest amenities. In so doing, it helps ensure that guest visits do not begin or end on a frustrating note.
Enhances the guest experience by: enabling visitors to feel grounded/anchored at all times and allowing them to zero in on the casino/resort features that matter most to them.
4. Performance Events
Digital displays help to create more engaging, memorable performances by bringing the stage to life and highlighting what’s most exciting about the event. Displays that flank the stage can magnify the action for attendees, ensuring that even guests far from the performance feel intimately connected to it. They can also serve as backdrops to the performance, amping up the excitement. In so doing they raise the overall profile of the property and broaden its appeal.
Enhances the guest experience by: Amplifying and extending engagement. When used outside the venue for promotional purposes, digital displays help build excitement and awareness, reminding guests that they don’t have to go to NY or Las Vegas for entertainment of this caliber.
5. Location-specific external facility signage
Applications can range from poolside displays to courtside scoreboards, restaurant patio menus, parking signage, and more. Depending on the nature of your property, the deployment options and content possibilities are unlimited.
Enhances the guest experience by: Delivering the information guests need, where and when they need it.
Indoor Digital Displays
1. Video Walls
Nothing matches LED video walls for scale, flexibility and “techorating” potential. Their ability to display a wide range of content – including custom artwork and animations that communicate a property’s unique heritage and culture – fuels engagement, reinforces brand identity, and creates an ambiance that’s unique to a property. The flexibility of the technology also provides a vehicle to communicate the excitement of specific events and attractions.
Enhances the guest experience by: Delivering excitement at scale. Video walls also display custom content that evokes the casino’s unique brand in a way that comports with ownership’s vision for their property.
2. Sportsbooks
An increasingly popular casino amenity, sportsbooks deliver an experience that no home theater setup can duplicate. You can devote an LED wall to a single national championship match or take advantage of its immense size to show literally dozens of matches simultaneously.
Enhances the guest experience by: Communicating the excitement of the sportsbook and immersing guests in the experience, while efficiently conveying constantly changing game information for multiple matchups.
3. Digital Signage and IPTV
Use your existing IP network to share video content to any screen, at any time, including LED walls, LCD TVs, even kiosks. Moreover, television distribution (cable & satellite TV), local channel insertion, advertising and sponsorship networks, sportsbook information can all be shared across your property on a single network and easily controlled by tablets and mobile devices. Most casinos have digital signage and IPTV on dedicated networks, but a partner with the requisite expertise can unify your existing digital signage and IPTV to create powerful messaging and reinforce the perception of luck and winning. Currently, less than 50% of the casinos take advantage of unified digital signage and IPTV. The power and flexibility you’ll gain can be hard to imagine – until you seize it and see just how effectively it enhances the guest experience.
Enhances the guest experience by: Delivering custom content that alerts guests to features and promotions and enables owners/operators to tailor messaging to specific needs and enhance the perception of luck and winning. Imagine how it can alert guests to jackpots, for example!
4. Tickers
Display real-time live data in a constant crawl from any type of RSS feed or subscription service. From team stats to injury reports, breaking draft-pick news and game-day weather reports, tickers bring customers into the moment. The same technology can also promote happy hour specials, communicate jackpot totals, display breaking news, and much more.
Enhances the guest experience by: Delivering relevant information to guests clearly, instantly via responsive, impactful display.
5. Menu Boards
Digital signage technology combines high-resolution and brightness with the programmability necessary to update offerings and prices in an instant.
Enhances the guest experience by: Delivering clear, up-to-date information to inform guest choices.
6. Wayfinding
Customers want to lose themselves in the casino experience – without getting lost in a casino property. Digital signage’s ability to offer all relevant information in a single easy-to-view menu allows casino guests to see all relevant information at once. This enables them to discover casino features they didn’t know about and zero in on the ones they’re most interested in, all while keeping them oriented and in charge of their experience. Particularly in large, multi-purpose properties that combine gaming with meeting, entertainment, lodging and resort activities, effective wayfinding ensures customers’ comfort in your environment.
Enhances the guest experience by: Facilitating entry, egress, and movement within the property so that guests feel comfortable and informed and are thus more apt to stay longer and return more often.
7. Entrances
First impressions count for a lot in casinos. Indoor digital displays set the tone for the experience to come, stoking excitement and anticipation and differentiating your property from all others. The technology is also useful in transitional spaces, such as a porte-cochere or a walkway from a parking garage.
Enhances the guest experience by: Rewarding guests with a unique experience of welcome and a distinctive goodbye, thus imprinting the experience in their memory.
Maximize your messaging with powerful, relevant content.
A casino’s communication technology can only be as effective as the content it carries.
To maximize the return on their technology investment, casinos need to reinforce the perception of luck and winning at every turn and coordinate messaging to prompt guests to stay longer at the casino, return more often to the property, and promote it when they’re off-premises. These objectives can be advanced by choosing a technology partner who not only designs and integrates casino technology infrastructures but can help create the content they communicate.
Companies like Render Impact provide a myriad of customized animation and motion graphics services in a wide variety of digital formats for casinos. Integrators such as Alpha partner with Render Impact to create content that drives awareness, engagement and utilization, while reinforcing and augmenting a casino’s brand identity, including its unique heritage, culture, and values.
How digital display technology and content improve casino performance.
Smart operators focus on every aspect of the casino guest experience. Digital displays and content enhance it in three ways, each of which impacts the bottom line.
Digital technology facilitates guest visits
It’s important for casinos to do everything possible to make it easier for guests to find their property, utilize their property, and avoid experiences that might detract from the enjoyment of their property.
- Great building and wayfinding signage takes away the stress of getting to the property, navigating inside of it, and eventually leaving the property.
- Informational/promotional signage alerts guests to casino offerings so that they can get the most out of their time there.
- Interior displays provide essential details about various casino offerings, helping guests make informed choices faster.
Digital technology promotes the casino
Digital displays attract attention, spur engagement, and help drive action. In so doing, they can help promote a casino in various ways.
- They alert customers to the casino’s offerings. Marquee advertisements are powerful billboards. The lobby LED display may call visitors’ attention to a newly opened sportsbook. Another interior or exterior LED display might alert guests to an upcoming concert or ongoing contest.
- Digital displays, showing custom-created content, can create an ambiance and communicate aspects of character that are unique to a particular property or casino brand. For example, Alpha works with various tribes to create digital graphics that highlight their particular history and beliefs. Likewise, we work with operators to develop trademark visual experiences.
- Cloud-based video production accelerates timelines, reduces costs, and broadens your options for creating and delivering custom content across your facility.
Digital technology enriches the casino experience
Experiential Digital displays are core to creating memorable, transportive experiences.
- Walk into a lobby dominated by a large video wall and LED-wrapped columns and you’ll experience a “wow” moment that says, “I have ARRIVED.”
- From direct-view LED displays to flat panel video walls, to networks of LCD displays, the possibilities for excitement and engagement are vast.
- Walk up to a slot machine that beckons with pulsating light and color-saturated, ultra-high-resolution graphics and try your hand at a game. If you win, the display goes wild – recognizing your luck, communicating it to everyone in the vicinity, and powerfully imprinting that moment in your memory.
Data visualization and custom modules further boost casino performance.
Enhance your digital signage – and drive ROI – with market-specific software modules that integrate third-party data into messaging.
Options include celebration modules, table game modules, digital concierge, scheduling integration, POS integration, life-safety integration, and third-party data integration.
Facilitating the guest experience. Promoting it. Enriching it. All three help to advance key casino objectives, including longer visits, more frequent visits, and more passionate brand advocacy from customers.
Real-world application of digital display technology and content
While enhancing the guest experience is an objective shared by all casinos, you can’t take a cookie-cutter approach to the task at hand. Each casino is different, not just in architecture and design, but in personality, heritage, and guest composition.
Alpha combines in-depth discovery with multi-industry mastery to deliver the optimal solution for each client. Here are a few recent examples of how Alpha’s casino team has driven success for our clients.
Muckleshoot Resort Casino’s innovative use of LED displays.
Only the power and scale of LED displays can communicate to guests the extraordinary experience awaiting them at the Muckleshoot Resort Casino, the biggest gaming property in Washington state. To realize the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe’s ambition for its two-phase, three-year property upgrade, Alpha designed and implemented digital signage solutions with custom content for the complex’s exterior and interior, including:
- A dramatic LED installation extending from the main facility’s porte-cochere into the lobby. Integrated into the ceiling, this oval, 40-foot by 50-foot LED display leads to an interior space that features two 165-inch wall displays and five LED-wrapped pillars, all delivering custom, synchronized content.
- LED-lit archways welcoming visitors who have self-parked. Casino guests arriving from the parking facility pass through a series of arched LED-lit panels, each driven by Alpha’s Scala digital signage system.
- Dramatic exterior LED. Visible all the way to the Interstate, six miles from the property, the resort’s new 400-room hotel tower features a 96-foot by 35-foot digital display that extends from the 7th to the 18th Alpha also integrated twin 35-foot by 16-foot LED marketing displays near the roundabout at the property’s entrance.
Together with a host of additional interior LED displays, Alpha delivered a technology solution worthy of the Tribe’s ambitions and its guests’ expectations. Read more about Alpha’s work for the Muckleshoot Resort Casino.
Promoting progressive slots for the Route 66 Casino.
When the Route 66 Casino asked Alpha to create an interior environment to house its new “Route to Riches” progressive slots, the mandate was clear: Stand out in an environment where every square inch of public space competes for visitors’ attention. Specifically, our solution featured:
- A 360-degree circular LED display. Designed to deliver way-finding information and running jackpot totals, the display featured Planar’s CarbonLight™ CLI Flex™ bendable LED modules (on a custom-built supporting structure designed by Draper).
- A 32-foot by 9-foot LED Halo screen, also by Planar. This promoted “Route to Riches” to guests on the casino floor.
- 270 LCD displays – all controlled from a TriplePlay IPTV System.
- 600 loudspeakers. Alpha replaced the casino’s aging audio technology with a QSC audio system that included 600 loudspeakers (in partnership with Sonance).
From day one, progressive slots have been a winner at this innovative property. Read more about our work for Route 66 Casino.
Updating the Coushatta Casino Resort with a new sportsbook – and more.
The Coushatta Casino Resort became Louisiana’s top gaming destination in part through constant innovation. So, it was no surprise when management contacted Alpha to help them stay a step (or several) ahead of the competition with:
- The Rez, a true Las Vegas-style sportsbook. This included a 30-foot, 1.5mm Planar LED video wall and custom sports ticket display, plus a 70-inch curved sports ticker outside the venue. Managing it all was a unique, low-cost system offering one-touch content switching, audio control and screen activation for every display.
- Upgraded digital signage casino-wide and IPTV technology. Years of mixing technology solutions had left the casino with a digital signage and AV infrastructure that was unwieldy, hard to maintain and in various stages of obsolescence. We provided one system to manage the casino floor and back-of-house content, as well as proprietary table game signage, interactive odds board signage with touchscreen technology, and more.
Coushatta made good on its reputation for bringing the latest casino technology to the state of Louisiana, including Alpha’s comprehensive digital signage package that supports The Rez sportsbook. Read more about our work for the Coushatta Casino Resort.
Imagine the possibilities for your casino guest experience.
Inside and outside a casino property, digital displays and content communicate essential information to guests by promoting the property and facilitating navigation and participation. More than that, these same displays can be part of a networked whole that amps up the excitement of being there while reinforcing essential elements of the experience – including the perception of luck and the possibility of winning.
The more deeply and consistently a casino engages its customers, the longer they’ll spend on-premises, the more often they’ll return, and the more enthusiastically they’ll want to share the casino experience with others. It all depends on your ability to connect to your guests. Alpha’s deep casino expertise leverages our end-to-end capabilities and multi-industry mastery to create experiences your guest simply can’t find anywhere else.
Contact Alpha to talk about the possibilities for your property.
FAQ’s
What is a casino guest experience?
The casino guest experience is the totality of actions that lead guests to visit a property, remain at a property, return more often to a property, and promote a property to others when they are off-premises. At the heart of the casino guest experience is the perception of luck and winning, but it also involves the excitement that comes from being in a unique and highly stimulating environment filled with attractions that can’t be found anywhere else under a single roof. From the gaming floor to event performance venues, drinking and dining destinations, resort and meeting facilities, and specialized, highly experiential attractions, casinos provide a guest experience unlike any other leisure destination.
How does a casino guest experience create an impact?
The casino guest experience creates an impact through power and scale, as well as the variety and uniqueness of a casino’s offerings. Communication technology ranging from LED wall “techoration” to digital signage and IPTV is core to creating that impact, as it drives awareness, engagement, and utilization of the property’s features, driving the perception of luck and winning.
How can casinos improve the guest experience?
By partnering with an expert technology provider, casinos can provide a uniquely powerful, memorable, and desirable guest experience that drives awareness, engagement, and utilization. Communication technology such as LED displays, digital signage, and IPTV can be unified and customized to foster the perception of luck and winning, connect guests to the casino features and attractions that matter most to them, and communicate the unique character, heritage, and personality of the property. As a result, casino guests will stay longer at a property, visit a property more often, and promote the property to others when they are off-premises.
