San Manuel Transforms

How an agency used Pilotly to optimize their pitch for new campaign business

The Challenge

San Manuel Casino, one of the highest grossing adult gaming venues in the US, had begun a $550M expansion to offer a luxury hotel and spa experience. To increase awareness of the new facilities among
current patrons and new consumers, they reached out to a set of ad agencies with an RFP to rebrand their venue offering.

Doner, an agency servicing Netflix, Digiorno and others, was enlisted for this rebranding effort. They made two executions, but their creative team felt strongly about one of them in particular. Doner decided to reach out to Pilotly to see how consumers respond to their campaigns, helping them enhance their pitch. Our goal was to determine which campaign elicits the most consumer recall in regards to the new experiences they plan to offer and is most likely to drive intent to visit San Manuel.

The Methodology

Features Used

Sentiment Analysis
Content Reel Generator

For this screening, we captured a set of male and female casino goers aged 30-65, all of whom lived in either SoCal, AZ, NV or UT. We balanced this audience with a 50/50 split between ages 30-47 and 48-65. All participants were required to have visited a casino at least once in the past year.

To properly present all the creative assets, we took the billboard images, web banners and vibe/treatment video associated with each campaign, compiling these assets into a content reel for viewers to consume.

The Results

Using Pilotly, Doner targeted 450 consumers in southwest US who frequent local casinos. Pilotly generated three different reels that included combinations of the print / outdoor and video assets from the current San Manuel campaign, as well as the two new executions Doner produced.

Consumers were then routed in groups of 150
to each reel, and within three days we captured data that was able to indicate Campaign 1 rated highest and boosted brand perception over the original campaign. Doner’s creative team cleverly used results from Campaign 2 to extract data that supported the story they wanted to tell the client. This enhanced their pitch which pushed towards an all-new take on San Manuel’s brand look and feel. San Manuel found Doner to have the strongest creative pitch.