Supernova Award Category

The Problem

MGM Resorts faced a huge data and asset management challenge: how to manage content and customer information across about 16 resorts in a way that would differentiate itself from the competition. To maintain market share and avoid losing millions of dollars of revenue to competitors, MGM Resorts sought to provide guests with the best possible experience before, during and after their stay, and enhance its digital experience across its portfolio and provide a consistent, seamless and user-friendly platform. The digital marketing platform needed to feel like an extension of MGM Resorts’ award-winning, high-touch, on-property experiences.

The Solution

MGM Resorts’ strategy was to partner with a digital marketing expert to build a scalable platform that would streamline all technologies, content and data across our organization into one consolidated system that would power guest interactions across a variety of channels. It was essential that the platform allow guests to easily filter through the overload of information about things to do based on relevancy of if there were in-market or out-of-market, time of day, etc. to help them with their decision-making. To achieve this, MGM Resorts searched for a best-in-class digital marketing and commerce solution, and Adobe Marketing Cloud met these needs.

MGM Resorts works with Adobe Analytics, Adobe Campaign and Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), to uncover new ways to create, curate and distribute personalized content. 

The results

With Adobe Marketing Cloud, MGM Resorts enables guests to easily filter through the vast amount of information about Las Vegas and focus on only the content they want in order to make a decision. Guests now can easily plan, book and manage their activities to maximize their time on property and have the best experience possible.

From a business perspective, MGM Resorts has been able to cross-pollinate content more easily to seamlessly market across all of its properties and viewed across all device types. Now the company spends less time duplicating content and building components/templates so they can spend more time on storytelling and strategy. Leveraging Adobe Marketing Cloud, MGM Resorts also is taking a data-driven approach to increase its chance for engagement and conversion. The separate experience gives MGM Resorts the freedom to create rich, on-brand experiences, so the brand can stay connected with guests throughout their journey to drive personalization and optimization via measurement and behavior tracking across touch points.  

Adobe Marketing Cloud is enabling MGM Resorts to reach its goals of increasing direct online booking, incremental spend on property, number of annual visits, new guest acquisition, and overall market share and share of wallet. 

Metrics

Highlights of results include:

• Over the last 18 months, MGM Resorts has seen incremental cross sell revenue as we actively promote restaurants, tickets and rooms.
• 5 MGM Resorts’ property sites live in 9 days (a record)
• 9,000+ image assets uploaded
• 92 registered DMP users
• 10 interactive theater seat maps created
• 320 hotel room types set up
• 900+ pages authored
• 4 web technologies replaced with one
• 1 update populates contents for multiple property sites across all devices; prior to that, all had to be done individually by property and separately for mobile and desktop, which was inefficient and could lead to errors 

The Technology

MGM Resorts utilized Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target. AEM is a comprehensive content management solution for building websites, mobile apps and forms; Adobe Analytics applies real-time analytics and detailed segmentation across marketing channels; and Adobe Target is a personalization solution that makes it easy to identify the best content through tests that enable marketers to deliver the right experience to the right customer.

Disruptive Factor

Ensuring our distinctive, world-class brands could use a platform that enabled standard templates and components was of high importance to MGM Resorts, but finding the right solution to accommodate this was no easy task. In addition, we were executing against a guest strategy where the digital had to support the physical property. It was important to have the correct guest experience on any device anywhere; hence the use of Adobe Search and Promote on the homepage. A guest can see different content based on device, location, and logged on state. It was a challenging implementation to use the technology in this unique fashion and required a significant amount of upfront planning. We’re confident this has given us a huge competitive advantage in terms of guest interaction and information delivery.

Shining Moment

This was truly a cross-company effort of which that MGM Resorts is proud. From the initial design, implementation and go-live, there was strong support from senior executives to the front-line employees. Hailed as one of the key, strategy technology projects in the company's history, stakeholders across numerous departments - including Ticketing, Hotel Operations, Casino, Entertainment, Legal, IT, Marketing - all worked together to ensure everything was efficient and effective.