OLG PlaySmart

Wednesday, July 19, 2017

OLG’s Responsible Gambling team approached us with an intriguing and open mandate: How can we do more good for our players? The usual, broadly accepted approach had essentially been to try to use logic to counter a belief in luck, but that hadn’t yielded the desired results and wasn’t likely to in the future.

We conducted a thorough analysis of OLG’s situation, industry data, the various inputs and resources available to players at every stage of their engagement, and interviewed key OLG and public health-related stakeholders (e.g., CAMH, Responsible Gambling Council). The result was the creation of a comprehensive, tiered player education strategy. Further it was to be named and branded as a distinct flanker sub-brand of OLG. This offered a number of strategic benefits. It would bring distinct focus to the new program, help allay possible concerns about mixed mandates for the seller/educator, and to make it “ready” if at some point the brand was to be applied in conjunction with the identities of gaming operators other than OLG.