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Familiar Faces
Pop-culture icons put the sizzle in brand-name slot games
By Dave Palermo

Among Bally Gaming's inventory of video and reel slot machines is one particular device with all the latest and greatest features geared to keeping the player glued to the screen for hours at a stretch.

It's got bright graphics and bonuses and an enticing, lip-licking, wide-area progressive jackpot. It's a low-denomination, multiline, multicoin marvel, loose as a goose and with hit frequencies that rattle like BB's in a boxcar.

But you know what makes this game far more lucrative than all the other Bally devices?

Betty Boop.
Branding - particularly the show-business variety - continues to be one of the hottest trends in a slot machine industry that last year generated 70 percent of the $32 billion gamblers lost in the nation's commercial and tribal government casinos. And few brands sizzle more than Betty Boop, the sexy 1930s cartoon vixen earning millions of dollars for Bally Gaming shareholders. At last count Bally had installed 1,000 Betty Boop slot machines in seven states.

"Betty Boop is big, and I don't think anybody knew just how big," said Randy Adams, marketing director for Anchor Gaming. "She just has mass appeal. She appeals to young people. Old people. Males. Females. I was looking at a golf magazine the other day. Do you know you can get Betty Boop head covers for your golf clubs?"

King Features Syndicate, which holds the copyright on the cartoon character, does, in fact, have a catalogue filled with Boop paraphernalia.

"You go on the Internet and type in 'Betty Boop' and you get dozens and dozens of sites offering dozens and dozens of items for sale," said Marcus Prater, Bally's marketing director. "She's been around for 70 years. But she's gotten really hot in the last 10 years or so. We had no idea she'd be as popular as she's become."

Branding slot machines has been the rage for the past few years, and the trend appears to be getting even hotter in the new millennium. Machine manufacturers are snatching up copyrights to movie and television celebrities, cartoon characters, popular board games and hit quiz shows.

Industry giant International Game Technology has jumped into the fray with both feet, grabbing dozens of copyrights to Hollywood movie stars (Marilyn Monroe and Arnold Schwarzenegger, among others), television sitcoms (I Dream of Jeannie, Bewitched and The Addams Family, to name a few) and quiz shows (Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy and Regis Philbin's Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?).

"You'd think we were in the movie business," said IGT Chairman Chuck Mathewson, who launched the craze some five years ago when he parlayed a charity dinner at the Los Angeles home of director Norman Lear into the wildly successful Wheel of Fortune line.

"But it works."

Perhaps. But not all the brands have been as big a hit as Betty Boop and Wheel of Fortune, a collaboration of IGT and Anchor's patented overhead spinning wheel bonus feature. More than a few industry observers believe the practice is getting too expensive and generating little in the way of financial rewards. And some brands aren't all that popular with the players.

"Branding is here to stay, but it's gone overboard," said one industry executive who requested anonymity. "It's gotten so prohibitively expensive. The people who own the brands hold you for ransom. And some don't work."

"If there's one clear message I'm getting from operators it's that they are pretty much fed up with the amount of licensing fees they have to pay," said Kent Young, marketing director for Aristocrat Inc. "It really is affecting their bottom line. The overall return that they're getting on the licensed products doesn't outweigh the amount they are paying in licensing fees over a period of time."

But there are success stories.

WMS Gaming scored big with Monopoly. And it hopes to duplicate that effort with Jumble, Scrabble, Pac-Man and Hollywood Squares.

Bally Gaming is tapping its relationship with King Features to develop wide-area progressives based on cartoon characters Blondie and Popeye.

And IGT subsidiary Silicon Gaming, which developed a proprietary Family Feud game for MGM Mirage, is following that up with a Price Is Right game for Harrah's Entertainment casinos.

Branding isn't everything
A number of casino executives downplay all the hoopla over the branding trend, including IGT, which not only controls 70 percent of the 500,000 slot machines in U.S. casinos, but the lion's share of the bigger brands.

"We at IGT are spending just as much, if not more, time developing new games that have nothing to do with branding," said Joe Kaminkow, IGT's vice president of engineering and game design. "Although the branded games do seem to get more attention, they don't always get the most amount of money and generate the biggest revenue streams.

"We're making sure we have a real good product. Then if we have a good brand that goes with it, so much the better."

The slot machine industry has in the last decade undergone a creative surge in new technology and software innovations. And branding machines is certainly not the most lucrative trend in the slot evolution. The coinless, or ticket-in, ticket-out, revolution will be far more significant to the industry's bottom line.

And the various methods of structuring licensing fees - whether it involves giving the brand owner a flat fee or a percentage of the gaming revenues - usually require that the casino foot all or most of the bill.

So what works?
Industry executives are not certain why a character such as Betty Boop or a game such as Wheel of Fortune is more popular than, say, the Three Stooges or Jeopardy.
"Clearly the machine that has a theme or title that is linked to some aspect of your lifestyle has a certain marketing attraction and intrigue about it," Rowe said. "Wheel of Fortune and Monopoly, for example."

It also helps if the brand appeals to the middle-age gambler, who in terms of market demographics is said to have the largest discretionary budget. That's supposed to be one of Betty Boop's selling points.

"Betty Boop has the right demographics," Prater said. "She appeals to the 50-year-old woman."

Industry executives also note that a brand is no good unless it's tacked on a good machine.

Betty Boop would not be so popular if she weren't riding Bally's low-denomination, multicoin, wide-area progressive jackpot. And Wheel of Fortune success may be due as much to the bonus wheel as to the brand. I Dream of Jeannie wasn't a popular game until the graphics and animation improved and she was placed on a device with a bonus wheel as part of IGT's joint venture with Anchor Gaming.

"A good game is a combination of a lot of stuff," Kaminkow said. "Does it feel right? Does it spin fast enough? Does the sound communicate well to the player? It's a whole philosophy of game design. And I have to tell you, it's really hard to make games. I had a lot more hair when I started this job."

There is a theory that popular brands are most effective in tourism markets such as the Las Vegas Strip, where gamblers who visit three or four times a year may gravitate to popular television, movie and cartoon characters.

In contrast, most casinos in the country are in smaller markets that appeal to local residents who visit a property several times a week and are loyal to the machines that pay off the most.

"When you've got people walking into a casino three times a week, versus once a year, you obtain game branding out of the game itself," said Young of Aristocrat, which restricts its investment in branding to Kenny Rogers and "The Gambler."

"You don't necessarily need a noncasino form of branding," he said.

Even Betty Boop isn't as lucrative in the smaller markets targeted by Mississippi casinos.

But Rowe believes there is room for Betty Boop and other brands in small towns.

"In every casino, you have people who have never been there before, and you have people who come back more frequently," he said.

"People in a casino for the first time, because they have a preconceived notion about what a slot machine should look like, may gravitate toward something with three reels and a handle.
"Or they may gravitate toward something they're familiar with, like Wheel of Fortune."

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