iGaming Daily

00:00
Welcome to iGaming Daily. I'm your host, James Ross. And today we're diving into one of the industry's most vital and evolving topics, responsible gaming. This episode will be from a panel session straight from this year's SBC Summit Americas, where our guest, Laurie Kalani, chief responsible gaming officer at DraftKings, one of the first roles of its kind in the sector with a background as a consumer protection lawyer advising major tech companies like Facebook and Uber.

00:29
Lori brings a rare blend of legal insight and personal experience, having seen first hand the impact of problem gambling in her own life growing up in Las Vegas. Lori will discuss innovative campaigns like their sing-along to Kenny Rogers the gambler, advanced risk detection using AI, and personalised features like my stat sheet. She'll also cover industry-wide efforts such as the responsible online gaming association and challenges posed by unregulated markets.

00:59
Hello everyone, thank you for joining us. Excited to talk about responsible gaming, not just what it is, not just what a great company like DraftKings is doing with it, but how it has to evolve as gaming evolves, how we think about gaming evolves. So, Lori, I'd love to get started with just asking you about what went into becoming the first responsible gaming officer at DraftKings, which is again, one of the first positions across the entire industry that does this kind of thing.

01:28
Thanks, Sam. So what really attracted me to the job was the intersection between the player experience, the business integrity, and the consumer protection aspect. I'm a former consumer protection lawyer, so this really spoke volumes to me. Grew up in Las Vegas and had my own experiences around gaming, so it was a perfect fit for me. You're right, it is the first chief responsible gaming officer role, but

01:57
What I'm doing is not new to DraftKings. I was brought in to really centralize the position and build and innovate on what they had already built and take it to the next level as this industry and the company itself grows. So what's your vision since you've got there and what does success look like? Success looks like all of our players interacting with our tools and having that education. So we have a great suite of tools.

02:25
We have a great responsible gaming center and I can talk more about those later, but success would really be where everybody understands what responsible gaming is and most importantly, what responsible gaming is not. I think there's a lot of education we still have to do. And before you took this role, you spent a lot of years in regulatory law, working with state AG practice. When I first heard about this, it seemed like a surprise, a shift to me.

02:53
Can you tell us why maybe that wasn't the case and how that experience has helped shaped what you do as you approach responsible gaming? Sure. So I spent about 20 years in private practice as a lawyer and I specialized in consumer protection law. I worked with companies to help them develop and implement policies around consumer protection. And if God forbid they were investigated or sued by an attorney general, I was the lawyer that defended them.

03:21
The goal was always to be preventative and proactive and do the right thing. before that, I actually started in banking and worked in customer service before I went to law school. So I just have a long history in that customer service, consumer protection, doing what the law requires, working with heavily regulated companies in private practice. I represented Facebook and Amazon and Uber. And so I really had worked with a lot of

03:50
new, oftentimes disruptive companies. And I had an appreciation for what the work that you need to do to help regulators understand, to collaborate and say, okay, we all have the same objective here, but how do we get there? We know the business side, the regulator knows what they're trying to achieve. this was really, and I represented DraftKings.

04:17
And I knew the business, I'd represented them for about 10 years, and I just kept talking to them about responsible gaming. Again, something very personal to me, as well as a professional topic that I was an expert on around consumer protection. So it's not very different at all than what I was doing, but for me, it affords me the opportunity to focus on one topic instead of having 20 clients and 20 topics, which is really a privilege.

04:47
Could you please tell us a little bit more about that personal connection to gaming? I know you've seen some of the goods, some of the bads, and you have a really unique perspective I'd love for everyone to hear about. Sure. So I grew up in Las Vegas. I moved there when I was in sixth grade. And when you're in sixth grade, you don't know why you're moving. Your parents tell you you're moving. My parents told me I had sinus problems. And so we had to move to the desert. But it turns out that my dad was a compulsive gambler.

05:16
And he was moving to Vegas to make that, he used to call it Someday. Someday was gonna happen. And I did not know that at the time, right? I was a young kid. But after getting there, it was probably a matter of three and a half years and things started to spiral out of control.

05:36
My parents got divorced, my mother started gambling, I had an older brother who started gambling, and my whole family was basically disintegrated. They left me in the street at 15, I dropped out of high school. know, turned out okay, right? I had a lot of willpower and I was strong and I got myself out of a big mess, but, you know, I...

05:59
For years I've thought about it and I've had clients in the gaming space and what I see is a lens where there's really the vast majority of people don't have the horrific problems my father had and that my mother had. And I do know that you can do this for fun and entertainment and that there are a certain number of people that very seriously need help, but I just thought that I could really play a part in.

06:28
trying to educate and really help people understand that there's a fun and entertaining way to do this. you know, it just gave me two perspectives. Thank you for sharing that. Zooming out a little bit, this is now a $50 billion industry. We've talked about how much the industry has grown, but I don't think we talk enough about how it's changed. A, the way we gamble, people now bet from the palm of their hands in 38 states.

06:56
winning, losing money in an instant. And the way we think about gambling, the way we think about betting has also evolved rapidly in a short amount of time along with that. How does responsible gaming have to evolve, not just with this rapid pace of gambling evolution, but to stay ahead, hopefully, and lead? Yeah, so we're in a great time for responsible gaming because the technology's on our side, right? We have so many tools. Like I said, I grew up in Las Vegas and the casinos were always

07:26
talking about responsible gaming. But it's hard to see when you're in a casino and I'm in the arcade watching my dad gamble away the mortgage, right? I never actually saw with my own eyes tools or things that were happening. I'm sure things were happening, but I didn't see them. They weren't really tangible to me. so gambling's been around forever.

07:50
And this is just a new way of doing it, just like socializing's been around forever and social media became a new way of doing it. And so I think that we have the ability to meet our players where they are, we have the ability to provide tools and guardrails and put things in place that are available for every player. And it's just a matter of making sure they're aware of them and most importantly, making sure there's no stigma around using them because

08:19
When I got to DraftKings, I started to say, what do our players say about our tools? And they said, well, by and large, players say, oh, I don't need to use those responsible gaming tools. I don't have a problem gaming. And that is the absolute wrong way for people to be thinking about this. I'm not an alcoholic, but when I go out drinking, I take an Uber. And it's not because I'm an alcoholic. I'm definitely not even a heavy drinker.

08:47
but I do the responsible thing. And I think that this is new enough that we can't assume people know. And I'll give you one more example. When social media sort of exploded on the scene, how many of you know somebody who lost a job or didn't get a job after an interview? Because a picture of them was discovered on Facebook where they were dancing on a bar in college.

09:16
Everybody has those pictures, but what those people didn't realize was that there were controls that had to be used and there were tools they could use on Facebook to make those private pictures private. And people didn't understand that, maybe it wasn't intuitive, and so over the years I watched Facebook really improve, well guess it's meta now, I guess I'm aging myself, but I watched them.

09:42
really improve their tools. The privacy preferences used to be in a menu and then the privacy preferences were right there hovering over the picture as you posted it. And now if you talk to people, those people aren't posting those pictures anymore. If they are, they're setting the right privacy controls around them. So I really think that we have a real opportunity to put all kinds of data in front of our players. mean, we have something called My Stat Sheet.

10:12
It's a responsible gaming tool. We don't call it a tool, we call it my stat sheet. And nearly half of our players have used that since the start of NFL. And they're not saying I don't need my stat sheet because I don't have a problem gambling. They're saying, oh, this is cool. I get to see how much time I've spent, my net wins and losses. I can look at it in visual graphs. so I think.

10:37
We can use the technology to do more of that and really customize things to give people information and help them be informed and make their better decisions. Sounds like you're having success or you found success when it comes to adoption with how you market responsible gaming, how you talk about problem gaming. You just mentioned MyStat is not called. Here's this RG tool you have to click on. Can you talk about how that's evolved since you've been there and where you kind of see that going as we keep developing responsible gaming?

11:05
Yeah, it's a great question. mean, we just launched a multimillion dollar campaign with a commercial. I hope everybody here's seen it. It's a responsible gaming ad and it's a sing-along to the Kenny Rogers song, The Gambler. And that to me was like a real step in the direction where I would like to see things go, which is really focusing on the fun and positivity and the fandom.

11:31
but building in that responsible message, right? And the song really did it for us. So we're looking at things like that and we're doing the research. We work with the Responsible Online Gaming Association and that was founded last year by the eight largest operators in the business. And Rogue is spending a lot of their time looking at.

11:56
the research around how you talk about responsible gaming because it's not what we say, it's what people hear. We want to talk to people in their own language because if they're hearing something, we may love it over there at DraftKings behind our desks, but we have to make sure it's resonating with the players, with the people, and frankly with the broader audience because everybody's got a mother, a sister, a husband, a friend, somebody who's playing on Fandool or DraftKings or...

12:25
what have you, and so I think it's really an education that we wanna put out there for the world, which is why I love the gambler ad. You mentioned a few tools, but I wanna let everyone know how DraftKing specifically tracks and finds and identifies an at-risk player. How does that process work? Yeah, so, you everybody has different levels of play, and I always say we shouldn't get caught up on the amount of money because for somebody, $50 could be

12:55
traumatizing. For somebody else, $50,000 could be a drop in the bucket. So I try to steer people away from just thinking about amounts and thinking about behaviors. so New Jersey actually has some best practices. And they were really a leader on this. And I don't know if Dave Rebuck's here. the former director of DGE really under his direction

13:23
put out these best practices and they require operators to monitor for about 11 different behaviors. And it's things like canceled withdrawals and extended periods of time on the platform. And so we didn't just do that in New Jersey, we really expanded that. Now a few other states have...

13:48
sort of mimicked what New Jersey's done, but we're doing that across our platform. So we're looking at those behaviors and when we see those, we send messages to players and we're trying to personalize those, right? So if you're making multiple deposits, we send you a message that talks about setting deposit limits or multiple deposits. But I think we've even got work to do there because we could...

14:16
have normative messaging. We could have messaging that compares to what the average person does. We could have personalized messaging that says, you deposited X last week. This week, you deposited Y. So we're working on the research to allow us to understand what would resonate best. But that's one way we're using technology. Another way we're using technology is with a large language model. We're looking at every customer communication we have to identify when somebody might be in a crisis.

14:46
and were able to escalate those tickets immediately. Now, we will expand that. We'd like to look at that in a more expansive way to say what sort of interactions would, in the written communication, separate from the play, might indicate that somebody could use some education, that somebody would have otherwise triggered one of those alerts on the side if they were playing.

15:13
You know, we want to get smarter with the AI and looking at our customer communications, but we're certainly already using it for certain, for certain uses. And then the last thing I'd say about, you know, the technology is just my stat sheet. We're, taking everybody's data, dropping it into these graphs and charts and showing it back to them in a really interesting way so they can be more informed and aware of their own play. Once you do intervene,

15:43
once you do identify these players and you help, how do you evaluate how that intervention is working? Where does it need to go? How could it improve? What's working well with it? Yeah, so if somebody gets an alert because of some behavior, like I said, let's just use New Jersey, for example, and then they get a second alert, we have analytics that show that we're looking to see if that person's behavior changes.

16:13
And we're seeing great results there. And you know, we make tweaks along the way. And I think the tweaks really need to be about the messaging. Again, should it be a full screen? Should somebody have to answer some questions? Should we give them information, you know, earlier? Is it education or is it pushing them to go to our responsible gaming center? Again, we're working on a lot of research around what the right approach is to educating consumers because

16:44
you know, we're at a deficit to begin with. If people don't understand the game, the rules, the risks, the odds of the game. So we want to make sure that for first time bettors, they understand what a parlay is and what that means when they're making that bet. but on those engagements, we are looking, our analytics team does look at, you know, repeat behavior. On the technology front, just sticking with it for a sec, the technology in

17:12
in gaming has been accelerated by this incredible demand we have, fierce competition, forces the successful companies like DraftKings to be technology first. But how has responsible gaming really benefited from that push in technology that's maybe been on the customer and marketing side, but now that's seeping over into your role and what you do? Yeah, again, I'd say it's great because we send responsible gaming customer messages twice a month.

17:41
We build it into all of our marketing messages, right? There's the 1-800-GAMBLER number on every marketing piece we put out there. We hear that phone calls are up substantially to 1-800-GAMBLER, and I say, well, isn't that a good thing? I mean, I didn't know about 1-800-GAMBLER before it was listed on every operator's ad, and so I think it's a good thing that people understand there's a support system.

18:11
The technology and the marketing are helpful for responsible gaming. It gives us a bigger platform and a broader net we can cast. When it comes to studying it, you alluded to it perfectly right there. A lot of this stuff has not been studied previously. Post-legalization, obviously people are going to be contacting numbers that are given out to them more. How difficult is it to really evaluate the numbers that come in when just a few years ago...

18:37
nobody had access to these numbers. How do you evaluate whether it's a good thing, it's a bad thing, what it means for companies like DraftKings? Well, we ask that question a lot and some of the answers I've received were people call 1-800-GAMBLER because they think they're calling DraftKings and they want to change their address on their account. And they get excited because there's a phone number, Because DraftKings really, you know, none of the companies anymore have phone numbers. Everything is write in and chat. And so

19:07
I think there's a lot of curiosity around it. I don't know about anybody here, but I've called it several times. I wanna see where it routes me to when I'm in a certain jurisdiction. I wanna make sure it's working and routing me. You know, I was in New York and I wanna make sure it'd route me to the New York correct number. So I've called it, I'm probably responsible for 10 calls. And I think there's a lot of that going on. So I think that to become hysterical and say, oh, there's a whole lot of calls when...

19:36
we're doing our best to advertise the number, I think is just, it's inconclusive at this point. What's your experience been like when you've called? Well, so I was in New York and I called and I wanted to be sure that I would get routed to a New York number. So the way it works is it's routed based on your area code. So I was in New York, I borrowed somebody's cell phone, I called and I was routed correctly. I haven't actually talked to anybody.

20:04
but I've just called from certain jurisdictions to make sure it's routing properly. There's a big perception about gambling that companies are successful when their players lose, when perhaps their players become prom gamblers. Can you talk about the difference, you alluded to it earlier, but between a high risk versus high value player for a company and maybe why that perception is not really the case? Sure. So we are a fun and entertainment company.

20:33
Yes, it involves gambling. People who are doing it for fun and entertainment have a budget. We would like them to spend their budget with DraftKings. We think we've got a great product and a great experience. We spend a lot of money going out and getting new customers, right? We market, we have promotions. We do not want to lose customers. So we want sustainable people who have a good experience. And I've never met anybody who

21:02
has a problem who says they had a good experience. And so that is not what we're trying to do. But do we want people to spend money on draftings? Yes, of course we do. The same way any other casino around the country wants somebody to spend money, but that's for fun and entertainment. There is no place for people with problems on our platform to be playing. And when we become aware of that, we shut those accounts. How much apart?

21:29
of your work is that, trying to change that perception around how these kind of companies operate, what problem gambling is, and how we think about it as a society is obviously gaming has just evolved so much just past five years, every day really. Yeah, I mean, look, it's gambling. A lot of people out there in the United States didn't want to see it legalized, right? And so they're critics, and there's healthy scrutiny around gambling.

21:57
I think it takes time. You have to walk the walk and talk the talk. And I think oftentimes the majority of our players are forgotten about. There's a lot of attention given to somebody who says, had a problem. That problem escalated due to online gaming. But I don't want to forget all the other people who are coming for the first time and will play on DraftKings or elsewhere.

22:23
I wanna make sure those people understand that those tools are available and that they're normal and that they tell their friends, you we all go skiing, we all wear ski helmets, we get in a car, we all put on a seatbelt. I just think we have to normalize and create a culture where people aren't afraid to say they use it. In fact, it's cool, right? It's just what you do and I think that will go a long way. You know, there's, you know, it's...

22:49
It's heartbreaking, there's problems in every industry, but again, I try to keep a focus on doing what we need to do to make sure that people with problems are not playing, but not forgetting the rest of our players to make sure they have what they need to have a very enjoyable experience and be a sustainable customer. As the legal market has expanded, so has the black market, which really does benefit from the legalization of online gaming without any of the same protections, guardrails.

23:19
this countless list of things they don't have to do, that companies like DraftKings do. How much does it complicate or make it more difficult to protect your players when you have this proliferation of the black market that's still very much out there? Yeah, it's a huge challenge. I'll tell you, Connecticut, about six weeks ago, think, shut down one of these illegal sites. And in their press release, they said that 10 % of the people playing on that Connecticut site

23:48
were on the state self-excluded list. So that tells me that as hard as we work to make sure we are doing everything possible to never communicate with people who have self-excluded or people who we have banned for RG reasons, there are these other avenues for them, right? If they get that urge again and they've been strong enough to self-exclude with us or one of the other operators, they still, or all the operators, they can still go to those illegal sites and

24:16
And some of our research has shown that people don't even know the difference between a legal and illegal site, which is terrible because their norm will be going somewhere where there's no education, there may be no deposit limit tools, there may be no opportunity to cool off. Somebody just told me that they were on a self-exclusion list, or they are on a self-exclusion list, and every single day they get emails, texts, and phone calls.

24:45
from the illegal sites saying, don't worry, we're not connected to the self-exclusion list. So this is like direct marketing. They know they're on a self-exclusion list and they're marketing to them. So that really blurs the lines, right? I always say we're taking two steps forward and three steps back some days. So it's a real shame. And I think that the more people understand that there is a legal market and frankly, the more states actually accept that

25:15
There is illegal gambling going on. It's everywhere. Why not legalizing and regulating gambling? They're not doing anybody any favor. It's much better to have a transparent regulated market where people are following the rules. Last year, DraftKings became one of eight companies to form the Responsible Online Gaming Association. It's been about a year. I have to imagine it's very hard to get all these competitors, not just on the same page, but in one room at the same time.

25:45
Why go through all that trouble? What are the benefits of having so many different companies in this industry connected? Yeah, mean, Rogo was a brilliant idea and it formed last year. Like you said, we're one of the founding members. You know, I always say we compete for business. All of these operators were competing like crazy, very competitive. But when it comes to responsible gaming, there should be no competition, no walls.

26:09
We should be taking the best ideas. If we want this industry to thrive, we should be taking the best ideas and implementing them across the board. So that's really one of the purposes of ROGA, for us to be able to come together with the other seven operators and say, what are the best practices? And then actually formalize those. And we're in the process of doing that. Two other things I'll mention about ROGA, well, three. Know your play. This is the first concerted effort to really educate college

26:39
aged people. There's been a lot around the NCAA and the athletes, but there's really been nothing around just college populations. so Know Your Play is a great digital education program about, it's got lived experience, it's got financial literacy, responsible gaming that's available at campuses across the US free of charge. Another big initiative that Rogue is working on is

27:08
a national self-exclusion database. And so today, if somebody self-excludes on DraftKings, they can turn right around and go to FanDuel or Fanatics. What this would do is allow all of the ROGA members to share the names of anyone who self-excludes on their platforms so that person would be self-excluded on all of the ROGA members' platform. Now, that will be a great improvement, but again, with the illegal sites, it's not...

27:38
It's not the perfect answer. you know, I'll tell any regulator, any law enforcement person any day that, you know, enforcement has to be part of, you know, the government's agenda here. I have to imagine a tremendous amount of work goes into that. It sounds very simple, but it doesn't seem so simple. The self-exclusion. Yeah. No, it's extremely difficult. But Rogge has got Dr. Jen Shatley.

28:02
who is running ROGA. She is a foremost expert in responsible gaming and she's doing a great job. She's a convener, she collaborates, she's very, very reasonable and she's driven. So we've chosen a vendor for that database and the work started. So we're hoping that'll be kicked off here and I'm not gonna put a time around it, but the work has begun and we've got all kinds of people working on it to get it done. You've spent a considerable amount of time

28:32
talking about specific groups we have to think about, not just betters, not just people who watch sports, mothers, brothers, husbands, children, college age students, everyone has a different kind of responsible gaming message that fits them. How much do we still need to evolve on that front? And I imagine when you got in, it wasn't always so tailored. There's probably a lot of work still to go when it comes to all these different kinds of groups who aren't necessarily betters, but people impacted by it.

28:58
Sure, mean the Massachusetts AG's office has a youth sports safety coalition, I'm getting the name wrong, but it's something like that, youth sports safety coalition, where they are gonna go out and educate 12 to 20 year olds about financial literacy and gambling. I don't know exactly what the curriculum is, I think that's still being built, but I think that's brilliant. Look, it takes a village, so I think that...

29:25
Once you're out there educating kids in the 12 to 20 year old space, you probably should be educating the parents because the kids are gonna come home and talk about that. And there's gonna be a lot of parents, just like a lot of parents didn't know what Facebook was when kids started signing up for it. So I think there's a broad education that has to happen. Yes, we are educating our players. We are doing our best to educate the public. Massachusetts and I believe other states will look to educate the younger generation.

29:55
ROGA is educating the college students, right? So I think that there's gonna have to be a broad education for everybody, because everybody's gonna know somebody. It's sports, people love it. They've been gambling on sports for years, and now they'll be doing it online. Wrapping up here to talk about the future, we've talked about lot of the challenges that you face. What are you excited about going forward? What does the future of responsible gaming look like? I'm gonna work myself out of a job. That's what the future looks like.

30:24
Like the Maytag repair man, right? There's gonna be nothing to repair, I'm hoping. Really a world where you say responsible gaming, people know what you're talking about, very broadly, and where every person, we look at our customers monthly, quarterly, and we survey them, and I won't be happy until 100 % of the people come back and say, yes, I know the tools are there. Maybe they'll choose not to use them, but I wanna know that 100 % of people understand what responsible gaming is and.

30:53
and know where to find those tools. Thank you so much, Lori. Thanks, Sam.