MGM Grand Casino & Resorts

The Challenge

When it comes to Vegas, the digital customer experience doesn’t end when you book a room. Everything from restaurants and shows to spa treatments and exclusive beach parties can be booked directly from your hotel’s mobile app at a moment’s notice. But while MGM Grand and their associated resorts had no shortage of guests, they were having a hard time surfacing relevant entertainment in a timely way, making it hard for them to increase their Share of Wallet (SOW). And with the complexity of multiple back-end systems that didn’t play nicely with each other (including an outdated booking engine), they needed to completely rethink how they structured and delivered digital content.

The Insight

MGM Grand was sitting on a treasure trove of guest information, including personal preferences through guest’s MLife account, location data through user’s mobile devices, and up-to-date inventory and pricing information on nearby shows and dining across multiple resorts.

But in order to serve up personalized content recommendations at scale, they needed to restructure how they managed content on the back-end. By defining the individual elements and relationships between each content type and adding robust metadata based on defined taxonomies, they could use their enterprise CMS to match relevant content with guest preferences in real-time.

The Work

As a content strategy manager at SapientNitro (now Publicis Sapient), I worked closely with user experience designers, information architects, visual designers, and business analysts to break down content into distinct, usable content types. By mapping out the required elements of each content type, associated metadata, and the business rules that governed how they were displayed to users, we made it easy for non-technical users to update and manage dynamic, personalized content – all designed to power exceptional experiences.

In addition to authoring functional specification documents and content matrices to guide offshore development, I was also in charge of helping define the DAM governance future state roadmap. With hundreds of new digital assets being uploaded every month across all of their properties, they needed to have clearly defined roles, responsibilities, and committees to ensure consistent branding and adherence to keyword tagging best practices.

The Result

The project was a true team effort, and I can only take credit for my part in the overall implementation. But the results speak for themselves: 9% Year-over-year revenue growth and an 8% increase in direct bookings. And even more importantly, we helped MGM Grand achieve true digital transformation, moving from a static, disjointed, and antiquated content management architecture to a dynamic, structured, and personalized digital platform that enabled them to elevate the customer experience and capture more of their guest’s discretionary spending.