Testing Lottery Advertising: Both Wins and Draws Count

How is grand-scale research on lottery advertising like grand-scale research in agriculture? No one does it, who must thrive or fail according to the outcome. With my friend Jade I discuss tests of smaller scale, and we agree that there is usually something to be learned from a well-constructed test of advertising, even if the results are not what everyone wanted. After all, don’t we want to know what not to do? NASPL Insights August 2017

 

Daily Fantasy Sports: Entertainment, Information, and Gambling

European lotteries have had sports betting for some time, and have had to deal with the predictable problem of match-fixing. Daily Fantasy Sports is a US invention that caught fire in 2016, and that seems to avoid this hazard. The World Lottery Association asked me to write an explanation of Daily Fantasy Sports for a non-US audience. I was fascinated by how the sports-as-entertainment industry and the penetration of the Web changed how people talk about TV sports.This appeared as WLA Fantasy Sports summer 2017. 

Who You Are is How You Play

Reflecting on what I heard from two different lottery winners, I realized that each played in a way that expressed their big-picture view of the world – and that neither view was compatible with probability theory. But knowing better would not have made anyone happier! Still, lottery professionals need to understand the reality, unintuitive as it may be. NASPL Insights August 2016