The Challenge:
Keeping Pace With Promotional Needs
San Diego’s popular Sycuan Casino Resort wanted to drive revenue by always having timely and relevant promotional messaging around the property, but was restricted by costly static signage that could take days or weeks to plan and then produce, ship and put in place.
Casino resorts trade heavily on excitement — creating multisensory sight and sound experiences that encourage guests to stay, play and enjoy themselves.
Relevance and immediacy are important, and San Diego’s Sycuan Casino Resort was struggling to keep pace with all the promotions, events and activities around its property when using conventional backlit, printed vinyl posters. Between planning, production, printing, shipping and installation, it could easily take weeks to update promotional posters around the property. All said, a set of newly printed pieces could cost thousands of dollars.
Reducing those long timelines and excessive production costs was important, but the broader goal for Sycuan was to find a way to put resort promotions in the moment for its guests. Instead of planning weeks out, Sycuan’s promotions team needed a way to guide guests to events that were underway or forthcoming, create instant excitement about winners, and stream live video from performances and sporting events happening around the property.
A digital signage network was already in place on the property, but was underutilized. A major resort expansion, budgeted at more than $225 million, presented an opportunity to rethink and broaden the network. The expansion, completed in March 2019, added 500,000 square feet of space, including new gaming areas and a 12-story luxury hotel tower with more than 300 guest rooms.
“We wanted to make an experience that was a little bit different from what you would get if you went to another casino hotel in southern California,” explains Pat Tinklenberg, the VP of information technology at Sycuan. “For us, this was about providing a new experience to our guests.”