Engaging millennials remains to be one of the biggest challenges that the gambling industry, particularly the lottery sector, is facing today. So how should technology suppliers and iGaming operators address this?
At Mkodo, an iGaming supplier with 18 years of experience, the solution is simple: innovate.
In an interview with CalvinAyre.com’s Becky Liggero, Mkodo Executive Director for Business Development Sue Yoxall explained how the company decided to take a step back and regroup. And what they came up with, she said, was an innovation challenge in partnership with Teesside University, which specializes in game design and games development.
“We’re offering a challenge to students, with a prize, of coming up with concept for a new lottery game that appeals to the 18-30 market, and we will see what we get back from that,” Yoxall told us. “One of our design team leads is leading that process, and they will choose the winner and then that winner, we will create from that a white paper to send to our clients and potential clients, and if somebody would like to build that, we will engage with the student to help us do that.”
Mkodo is no stranger to innovation. The company started in 2001 with a goal of connecting businesses with customers on the mobile data channel. At the time, Yoxall said the method of choice was SMS messaging, so Mkodo built a product for customer engagement.
“We’ve always innovated with the technologies, it’s changed in the mobile channel and we moved to doing things with picture messages if you remember those, ringtones,” Yoxall noted. “We worked with the likes of Disney doing Finding Nemo ringtones and so on, and then we moved into the gaming space in 2007, when we started working with our long-term clients, Rank Group, doing website and we worked with them ever since, the technology’s changed, obviously. Smartphones came out around 2009, 2010—that changed the game for us because it takes us to through the history to where we are now which is doing apps and digital user experiences which are much, much more feature-rich than the original SMS.”
The rest, as they say, is history.
Yoxall said, “It’s been fantastic that we have such lovely clients, the British Columbia Lottery Corporation, the Atlantic Lottery Corporation. We decided it was time to focus completely on this industry so we worked betting and gaming, sportsbook thing, casino, lottery. It was time to tell everybody what we do because we make world-class apps and digital user experiences in this market, and we’d like people to know that now.”
