There’s a version of media planning that feels responsible. You have channels with measurable returns, can show your leadership team a report card with clear numbers, and the math looks good. The problem is that “looks good on paper” and “drives property growth” are not always the same thing.
I recently moderated a session at the Indian Gaming Association Tradeshow & Convention (IGA) with three people who have seen this play out across dozens of regional and tribal casino markets: Chad Hallert, CMO of Good Giant, who launched Caesars Entertainment’s digital marketing program in 2001 and now works with casinos across a wide range of sizes and markets; Catherine Montoya, advertising manager at Tachi Palace Casino Resort in California’s Central Valley, with 18 years at the property; and Adele George, owner of A.M. George Marketing, who has been planning and buying media for Native American casinos for 25 years.
Here’s what I came away with, and it’s a frame I keep returning to. Your media mix should be managed like a stock portfolio, not because it’s a clever metaphor, but because it’s operationally accurate. A portfolio isn’t all index funds or all bonds. It’s a mix of holdings calibrated to your goals, your market, and your tolerance for short-term volatility, and it gets rebalanced over time as conditions change and performance data accumulates. Your media plan works the same way, whether you’re managing it that way or not.
TL;DR:
A balanced media mix is not about splitting the budget evenly across channels. It is about assigning each channel a clear job based on your market, audience, and growth goals. The channels that look best in attribution reports often capture existing demand rather than create new demand, which is why regional casinos still need traditional media in the mix. Strong media strategy comes from balancing awareness and conversion, testing long enough to learn something real, and judging success by property outcomes rather than vendor dashboards alone.
The trap hiding in your best-performing channel
Certain channels will always win on paper. Google Ads is the clearest example. You spend a dollar, the platform reports you made ten, leadership is satisfied, and the natural next move is to put more money there. Hallert has watched this pattern play out across markets for years, and he’s direct about where it leads.
Why bottom-funnel efficiency can distort decision-making
The channels that are easiest to measure tend to get over-invested in over time. When you focus too heavily on the bottom of the funnel, targeting people who are already in the moment and looking for somewhere to go, you’re not creating demand. You’re capturing it. And in a regional market with a finite local audience, a significant portion of that “new” traffic is often people who were already likely to visit your property. The report card looks great. The property’s long-term health is a separate question.
“You focus on the things that are easy to measure and make your report card look good, but sometimes you look good while the property actually performs poorly.” — Chad Hallert
The measurement trap in regional casino marketing
This is what Hallert called the measurement trap: the gap between what makes your advertising look efficient and what actually drives growth. It hits regional operators especially hard because you don’t have the luxury of a destination market that constantly replenishes itself with new visitors. Your audience is largely local, and your repeat visitation depends on awareness, consideration, and genuine familiarity, not just conversion. Hollow out the top and middle of your funnel in favor of low-funnel efficiency, and you’ll feel it eventually, even if your weekly report looks fine in the meantime.
Why regional markets have a strong case for traditional media
Here’s something that doesn’t get said clearly enough: traditional media is not a fallback position for regional casino marketing. In many markets, it’s the right tool for the job.
Think about how your guests get to you. The majority are local, within an easy drive. But a meaningful share of your business comes from guests who travel farther, sometimes significantly farther, within your regional draw. Those guests decided before they got in the car. Something had to put you in their consideration set during the weeks before that trip, not in the moment they opened Google. That’s top-of-funnel work, and it’s exactly the work that local radio, morning news, and outdoor on your primary feeder corridors are built to do.
Traditional media builds consideration before the search
Your guests listen to local radio during their commute. They watch the morning news to check the weather and catch local sports scores. Your property’s name, heard on those stations and seen on those boards, is building something a banner ad or paid search result cannot replicate: the consistent, ambient presence of a brand that belongs to this community. The emotional and brand-building case for why that matters strategically is worth reading before your next budget conversation.
George has spent 25 years buying media in markets across the country, and her starting point is always the same: understand what actually reaches your audience before you decide what to buy. In rural and semi-rural markets, internet penetration isn’t uniform, and cable access isn’t consistent. Radio and outdoor can reach people in corridors where other channels simply don’t. “You have to know the reach of all of these things that you’re trying to use,” she told our group, “because sometimes those mediums don’t necessarily work that well, and sometimes they work better than anything else in the mix.”
Why local presence matters in competitive regional markets
Montoya’s experience in the California Central Valley reinforces this from the property side. Her market includes four or five competing casinos within a relatively short drive. Visibility isn’t optional; it’s existential. “We can’t afford to be absent from any type of media,” she said. “We have to have a little bit of everything.” That’s not a budget problem or a strategic hedge. It’s an accurate read of what it takes to maintain share of voice when your guests have multiple options and are deciding where to go based on what they’ve seen and heard lately.
Community visibility is a strategic advantage
The community connection dimension deserves explicit mention. Regional casinos compete differently than destination properties. Your guests aren’t choosing between you and a resort in another state. They’re choosing between you and a competitor down the road, in a community where your name either carries meaning or it doesn’t. Local radio sponsorships, morning news presence, and outdoor placements on the roads your guests actually travel: these investments build recognition that no digital channel can replicate efficiently. They also signal who you are as a property, present, invested, and local.
What “balanced” means in practice
A balanced media mix isn’t a fixed ratio. It isn’t 60% digital and 40% traditional, or any other number someone hands you as a benchmark. It’s a mix in which every channel has a defined role, every dollar knows what it’s trying to accomplish, and the whole is calibrated to your specific goals and market.
Start with goals, not channel percentages
Hallert offered a framework worth keeping. Start with your goals: acquisition, retention, reactivation, or some combination of all three, and to what degree each matters right now. Then identify your audience segments and where they actually spend their attention, not where a media rep told you they do, but where your data and market knowledge show they are. Build outward from there, with enough investment in each channel to move the needle and enough discipline not to spread so thin that nothing performs. If you want a channel-by-channel starting point for that build, covering OOH, radio, and linear TV versus CTV, this post on traditional media strategy for 2026 walks through the practical decisions specifically for regional properties.
Every channel should have a job
One thing worth noting: in today’s environment, most channels can serve most functions in the funnel if deployed correctly. Connected TV, for instance, is no longer just a broad-awareness play. You can use your CRM to remarket directly to lapsed guests via CTV, turning what appears to be a high-funnel medium into a precision retention tool. What matters isn’t a channel’s historical category. It’s how engaging the medium is for what you’re trying to accomplish and whether you have the budget to deploy it at a scale that actually produces results.
Consolidate fragmented budgets to create working media
One of the more consistent patterns Hallert sees across regional properties is budget fragmentation: individual restaurants, amenities, and departments each receive a small, siloed allocation, and those dollars are spread across multiple channels at levels too small to perform. An $800 monthly digital budget for one restaurant doesn’t give an algorithm enough data to optimize. Consolidating those allocations into a single food and beverage fund, flexed by season, event calendar, and need, gives you actual working media. It’s a harder internal conversation, but it’s the right one to have.
Testing a media mix: what it really requires
Any honest conversation about media planning eventually turns to testing, and any honest conversation about testing must begin with how much time it takes to learn something useful.
Why 60 to 90 days is the minimum
The consensus from our session: 60 days minimum, 90 if you can get approval. Not because that’s an arbitrary number, but because a single month doesn’t give you enough signal. A slow month, a competing community event, or an unusual weather pattern: any of these can suppress results in ways that have nothing to do with your media. George was direct about this: “Gone are the days of putting a few thousand dollars in to see if it’s going to work. You really actually have to invest in it, and you have to do it properly.”
Use holdout markets or zip codes as a control group
Another discipline worth building into your testing practice is using a control group. When you launch a new campaign, hold back specific zip codes from the buy. Then compare performance in those holdout zones with the markets where the campaign ran. If your test markets show lift and the holdout zones stay flat, you have real evidence that the campaign moved the needle, not just that a good month coincided with your new spend. It’s a simple methodology that gives you something concrete to bring to leadership when you’re asking for room to keep experimenting.
Don’t underfund a test and call it a lesson
One more point on testing: the worst outcome isn’t a test that fails. It’s a test funded at a level too small to produce a meaningful result, then used as evidence that a channel doesn’t work. If you want a structured framework for building a 90-day media test your GM will actually approve, including the talking points and the measurement plan, that’s exactly what the Casino Advertising Masterclass is built for. Size the test to be felt. If it works, the property should feel it. If it doesn’t, the property should feel that too. Either way, you learn something real.
Reading vendor reports with the right level of skepticism
One area where regional casino marketers often cede more authority than they should is vendor reporting. Every vendor has an incentive to look good, and most reporting systems are built with that incentive baked in.
Standardize attribution windows across vendors
The specific issue George and Hallert both flagged is attribution windows. Meta’s default view-through window is 24 hours, so if someone sees an ad and visits your property within a day, Meta takes credit. Many CTV and programmatic vendors use a 30-day window. If you’re running both and comparing their reported results without accounting for that difference, you’re not getting an apples-to-apples comparison. You’re evaluating channels against each other with incompatible measuring sticks.
The fix is straightforward, even if it takes some pushing: require all your vendors to track conversions using the same window. A 7-day view-through window is a reasonable standard across channels. Some vendors will resist because shorter windows mean less credit (for them). Push anyway. “They won’t like it,” Hallert acknowledged, “but you have to get them all equal.”
Your property metrics are the real source of truth
The broader principle: treat vendor-provided data as directional input, not as your source of truth. Your source of truth is your property. Floor traffic. Ticket sales. New member enrollment. Total revenue. When those numbers move in the direction you want, something is working. When they don’t, no vendor report changes that. If you don’t have an independent analytics layer, at minimum Google Analytics, running separately from your vendors, that’s worth addressing before your next planning cycle.
Questions to ask before your next media planning cycle
What job is each dollar doing?
If you laid out your current media mix and asked, honestly, what job each dollar is doing, could you answer specifically? Not “we’re on digital and traditional,” but: this investment is building awareness among guests who are 90 minutes out and haven’t decided where to go yet; this investment is reactivating guests who haven’t visited in 90 days; this investment is maintaining community visibility among people who drive past our outdoor on their way to work every morning.
Where is your mix over- or under-weighted?
That’s portfolio management. It isn’t more complicated than what you’re already doing. It just requires making the implicit explicit: being clear about what you own, why you own it, what each investment is meant to accomplish, and what you’d change if market conditions shifted.
Most regional operators haven’t had a structured conversation about this in a while. The day-to-day demands of running a marketing program are real, and planning discipline is often the first to slip. That’s exactly what the media audit is for.
Download the Casino Media Audit Checklist — a structured tool to evaluate your current media mix, identify gaps, and make the case for rebalancing with your GM.
If you’d rather work through your media mix with a partner rather than on your own, our casino marketing consulting includes exactly this kind of planning, from auditing what you have to building a mix you can defend.
Key Takeaways
- Your media mix should be managed like a portfolio, with each channel playing a specific role.
- Channels that are easiest to measure often attract too much budget over time.
- Paid search and other bottom-funnel tactics can capture demand without creating future growth.
- Traditional media still matters in regional casino markets because it builds awareness, consideration, and community presence.
- A balanced media mix is not a fixed formula; it should reflect your goals, audience, geography, and competitive landscape.
- Testing only works when it runs long enough and at a budget level large enough to produce a meaningful signal.
- Holdout markets or zip codes can help prove whether media actually drove lift.
- Vendor reports should be treated as directional, especially when attribution windows differ.
- Property-level results like revenue, foot traffic, and new member enrollment matter more than platform-reported conversions.
This post grew out of a session I moderated at the Indian Gaming Association Tradeshow & Convention (IGA) with Chad Hallert of Good Giant, Catherine Montoya of Tachi Palace Casino Resort, and Adele George of A.M. George Marketing. I’m grateful to all three for a conversation that’s worth continuing.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a balanced media mix for a regional casino?
A balanced media mix is a marketing strategy in which every channel has a clear role tied to business goals such as acquisition, retention, or reactivation. It is not a standard digital-versus-traditional budget split. The right balance depends on your market, guest behavior, competition, and budget.
Why do some media channels look more effective than they really are?
Channels like paid search often perform well in reporting because they capture people who are already looking for a place to go. That can make them appear highly efficient, even when they are not expanding awareness or creating new demand. Strong attribution does not always equal long-term growth.
Does traditional media still work for casino marketing?
Yes, especially in regional and tribal casino markets. Radio, outdoor, and local television can help keep a property visible in the community and top of mind before a guest is actively searching. In many markets, that awareness-building role is still essential.
How long should a media test run?
A useful media test usually needs at least 60 days, and 90 days is often better. Shorter tests can be distorted by seasonality, weather, events, or normal market fluctuation. The goal is to gather enough data to make a confident decision.
What makes a media test meaningful?
A test has to be funded at a level that gives the channel a real chance to perform. It also helps to compare exposed markets against holdout markets or zip codes. If the test is too small, the result may say more about budget limitations than channel effectiveness.
Why should casino marketers be cautious with vendor reporting?
Different vendors often use different attribution windows, which can make results look better or worse depending on the platform. Without standardization, comparisons are unreliable. Vendor reporting is useful, but it should support decision-making rather than define truth.
What metrics should matter most?
The most important metrics are the ones tied to actual business performance, such as foot traffic, new member enrollment, ticket sales, rated play, and revenue. Those numbers tell you whether the property is benefiting, regardless of what a platform report claims.
Julia Carcamo is the founder of J. Carcamo & Associates, a casino marketing consultancy focused on helping regional casino teams build strategies that compound.
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