Greg Carlin Targets Gen X Nostalgia With Vegas Club Casino
The Rush Street co-founder is pursuing a more mature audience in New Jersey with a new online casino brand
Greg Carlin has a wacky theory about the casino business.
He thinks people in the C-suite of gambling companies should probably enjoy gambling.
“I'm super passionate about the industry, and frankly, I'm a gambler myself,” Carlin said in an interview. “And I think that way too many casino executives, both brick-and-mortar and online, don't even gamble.”
Carlin gambles. He also helped build fairly huge businesses around it, co-founding both Rush Street Gaming and Rush Street Interactive before deciding almost five years ago to start over, once again, on his own.
His latest? Vegas Club Casino, which launched in New Jersey this summer through G2 Digital, the company he created with former PlayStar executive Dan Alexander.
And yes, New Jersey already has plenty of places to play Huff n’ Puff on your phone — 29 as of this writing. Carlin is also comfortable with the fact that the vast majority of those phones won't have his app on them.
“My business model isn't to become DraftKings or FanDuel and get 20% market share,” he said. “We can have a very successful business with 2% market share.”
Carlin said he knows exactly who that 2% is: someone who already likes going to casinos and/or remembers life before you could play blackjack in your kitchen while waiting for a pot of water to boil.
On point ads
The advertising for Vegas Club caught my attention for precisely that reason. It seemed aimed at people who remember the 1980s, a group to which I very much belong.
One ad in particular really gets to the heart of it. I’ve seen it all over Facebook. Its quick cuts all have a very prominent ‘80s feel. It starts with a Randy “Macho Man” Savage used car salesman, pivots to a hair loss commercial, goes to a Suzanne Sommers-like ThighMaster bit, to a canned Italian pasta spot, to one for MegaCorp Casino (we are eight seconds into the ad at this point), to a woman on a Donahue-like talk show weeping that she “just wants the old Vegas back,” which then goes to the Vegas Club Casino actual spot with the tagline, “Where we respect the gambler.”
Carlin confirmed that the — ahem — older audience is very much the point. He also teased a spokesperson for a campaign around this nostalgia theme planned for late fall or early winter, although he wasn't ready to identify the person.
His reasoning for the demographic choice is fairly straightforward, drawn from years of watching who spends money in physical casinos.
“People that are the older demographic generally have more money and time to spend in casinos, and people in their 20s are spending the money on beer and rent and whatever else,” he said.
Carlin is also targeting this Gen X grouping for another reason: He has some discomfort with how young the gambling audience can get. Carlin said his New Hampshire casinos set their minimum age at 21, even though the state allows entry at 18.
“I think it's too young,” he said. “I think that people shouldn't be gambling until they're 21, personally.”
The New Hampshire properties are part of Granite State Gaming & Hospitality, the physical casino side of Carlin's business. He said it has two casinos operating and a third under construction.
No sports, easy bonuses
Vegas Club took longer to get off the ground, and one major decision was to leave sports betting out of it. Carlin didn't see an opening to do something competitive there, especially with prediction markets now in the mix.
Another key decision was to rethink the traditional bonus offers. He demanded only a one-time playthrough requirement instead of 10x, 20x, 50x, or more. This shows in the sign-up offer, which refunds losses up to $250 in the first 24-hour period, with that 1x playthrough.
“We want all of our bonuses to be one-time playthrough, and we want to be transparent on all that stuff,” he said.
His other semi-revolutionary notion? To bring some of the experience of a physical casino to the phone, as Carlin thinks the industry spends too much time treating those as separate audiences.
“It's the same customer,” he said. “There's a tremendous amount of overlap between the two, and I don't think that each industry — brick-and-mortar and online — appreciate that as much as they should.”
So far, it’s working. He said the early results have exceeded projections, and Ontario and Pennsylvania are next in the hopper for Vegas Club Casino, subject to regulatory approvals.
But Carlin’s ambition remains pretty modest by gambling industry standards.
“I don't have to be the biggest to have a successful business,” he said.
Jeff Edelstein is a longtime columnist, reporter, radio host, and fantasy sports aficionado, not necessarily in that order. He lives in New Jersey with his family.
