Mobile Gambling in Spectrum Top 21 Casino Industry Trends for 2011
Dabo Mobile Game

An independent Atlantic City, New Jersey based research firm, Spectrum Gaming Group, included mobile gambling within the 21 most important trends for international casino operators to watch during 2011.

More specifically, according to Spectrum, the “Convergence of mobile Internet and social networking trends will present new opportunities for casinos to expand their gaming product variety and reach while enhancing the immediacy and geographic targeting of marketing efforts.” This is #6 on the alphabetically ordered list.

In other words, mobile casino operators will have a tremendous amount of data with which to build targeted marketing campaigns, or even develop entirely new products.

On the one hand, phones are increasingly capable of supplying Global Positioning System (GPS) data. This means (depending upon the gambler’s privacy and security options and settings) the casino operator could know exactly where the gambler is. Targeted marketing might allow the operator to offer whoever is mobile gambling a chance to win a free dinner at a local five-star restaurant or win a free shopping spree at a local department store.

On the other hand, people use social networks not only to communicate with their friends and colleagues, but to communicate their interests. For example, by harvesting this information, mobile casino operators might learn that a significant number of users are Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (ST:DS9) fans who would enjoy an opportunity to gamble online playing Dabo, a roulette-style game developed by the Ferengi (an alien race in the Star Trek Universe). The data could make a strong business case to prove it would be highly profitable for the operator to work out a deal with Paramount Pictures and develop the game.

This is the seventh year Spectrum has provided this list of 21 tends, but According to Managing Director Michael Pollock, “This list marks the first time that our list of 21 top trends can be considered an all-freshman class. None of these trends appeared in previous lists, although clearly many of them are tied to long-term issues — ranging from technology to politics — that we have been focusing on for nearly a decade…. You can attribute that large freshman class to the growing complexity of gaming. As the landscape expands, more molehills will inevitably rise up. An occasional molehill — such as this new-fangled Internet — threatens to erupt into a mountain.”