Going straight to the point! This is not about how casinos trick us into losing all our money without even noticing, the Greatest Evil vs the Innocent Gamblers type of battle. It’s about effective marketing strategies used by the best online casinos with the purpose of our complete gambling satisfaction. And yes, when the customers are satisfied, they will certainly come back. But achieving that requires a lot of selling skills and constant innovation. So, let’s find out how online casinos earn their ‘Best’ label.

The Main Focus is Having Fun

For most people gambling is a hobby. And a hobby is something you do because of the joy that it brings, a way to relax and unwind. Maintaining high levels of fun is the key to Return Casino Customers. However, gambling operators have a complex view of what’s fun and know its definition is different for the individual player. In short, their fun-delivering concoction swirls two basic approaches.

Approach number 1 is keeping it bright, light and colour-coordinated. In contrast to most land-based casinos which are always dark and kind of mysterious, the online platforms look cheerfully coloured, almost like a fairy-tale land where magic happens every second. There are barely any black or greyish backgrounds or other aggressive and cold colours. Our minds get and love the feeling of endless breeziness, memorize the feeling and make us go back searching for that same experience all over again. Not to mention, there are certain colours such as which are uplifting our mood or boosting the decision-making process. They’re often used as a background for bonus deals or other action-requiring tabs and segments.

Approach number 2 is keeping it simple and easy or at least easy-looking. Intuitiveness and user-friendliness are just as important the visuals. There is no way for a customer to come back if they lose an hour seeking for the FAQ section struggling with a complicated deposit procedure. What’s most annoying is the unstructured and chaotic look followed by confusing content and last, the lack of functional search and filter options. People enter a casino looking for fun and any obstacle is a deal breaker.

The Perfect Product Experience

Or to put it in other words – online casinos deliver the whole package. Nicely wrapped with a red bow on top and gifted with gratitude and love. Oh, what a cheesy story! But it works like a charm. Once you land on the ideal platform, you stay there! Because you get all that you can possibly need – game rules, demo modes, customer support, upgrading bonus system, stimulating VIP plan, a blog, the trendiest games and themes, one-click deposits. It’s a whole perfectly built world. You just have to find yours!

Now that you are familiar with the key influential tactics of the top online casinos, it’s time to know who they actually are. Here is a confession! My research was based on the top 3 casinos featured at www.toponlinecasinos.co.uk. On there you can get a deeper look at the leading UK gambling platforms right now. The reviews go way beyond the marketing strategies which we discussed and are a good help for UK players looking for the perfect casino.

Microgaming’s “Prime Property” seems at first glance to be a completely innocent little slot about… People selling real estate. So thrilling, right? Why make a slot about, I don’t know, superheroes, space battles or fantasy when you can roll symbols of folks trying to sell you real estate? Can you imagine working in real estate, and then coming back to play a slot about property? That must be the very definition of Hell itself! But wait a minute… Why WOULD Microgaming make that kind of slot, anyway? Did they just randomly pull the idea out of a hat, or is there something more to it, something hiding under the hood? Well, hang on tight, dear reader, because I’m going to blow your mind.

The secret to understanding this slot lies, of course, in its artstyle. The heads of the people selling you this prime property are huge, deformed, cartoonish and, honestly, a bit disturbing. They’re more caricatures than real people, their faces too odd and weird even by slot standards. And, well, there’s a good reason for that – this particular style of super deformed heads is commonly associated with political cartoons.

Political cartoons haven’t always looked like that, mind you. They’ve got a pretty long history, and for most of that they had adopted a rather realistic style that’s closer to our world than whatever cartoony reality these modern images come from. It wasn’t until the 1940s when they finally adopted their own, distinctive style, courtesy of a certain someone you might know as Dr. Seuss. Theodor Seuss is the guy who brought you classic children’s books like “How The Grinch Stole Christmas” and “The Cat in the Hat”. Believe it or not, his work in the early 1940s became rather politically charged, which makes sense considering the fact that a certain bad apple was causing a bit of trouble in Europe.

Dr. Seuss has always drawn his characters in a very distinctive style, with large, deformed heads, prominent facial features and smaller bodies. Which, honestly, made sense, as he rarely drew humans at all – his characters were all fantasy creatures and animals. But when his “Adolf the Wolf” cartoon hit papers, the world of political sketches changed forever. Gradually, artists adopted this style and continued to exaggerate it further and further, leading to the cartoons of today which feature characters that barely even look human, with large heads and facial features. Today, political cartoons can be found in papers and especially online, where they thrived and found a new life.

So that brings us back to the question of “Prime Property”. Why would a slot about selling property possibly adopt the style of political cartoons? The only valid reason I can think of is that it’s trying to convey a political statement… And when you look at the time during which the slot was released, you’ll quickly realize what that statement is. In 2008, the American housing bubble burst, leading to one of the worst recessions for the country in recent memory. To make a very complicated matter as simple as possible, the overwhelming demand for new houses led to an inflation of prices, which, in turn, led to people no longer buying houses, crashing the market and causing an economic imbalance. “Prime Property” came out in 2010, smack-dab in the middle of the recession, and the fact that it depicts smiling, grinning real estate agents trying to sell you property can’t be a coincidence. The slot is satire, a political statement about the state of the housing market following the burst of the bubble. It depicts the struggles of real estate salesmen to get their “prime property” sold in the midst of a terrible economic crisis. Their huge, exaggerated grins are mere masks, to hide the fact that they’re trying to sell you ridiculously overpriced real estate in order to just feed. And the fact that this whole thing comes packaged as a slot – a piece of art that’s inherently connected to money – makes it pretty damn brilliant.

NetEnt have a well-deserved reputation for making slots with really high production values, and their comic book-inspired offering, “Jack Hammer”, is among their best. Everyone and their mother was trying to make some kind of comic book-themed slot a few years back (hell, some never stopped – looking straight at you, PlayTech), and meanwhile NetEnt straight up said “You know what, screw it, rather than begging Disney or Warner Bros for the rights to DC and Marvel superheroes, we’ll just make our own!” And make one they did! Enter Jack Hammer, a private detective/gangster hunter set in a highly stylized version of the 1930s. He wears fancy colors, saves damsels in distress, and fights bad guys with ridiculous features, like lobster claws. Wait a second… That sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

Indeed, “Jack Hammer” is an homage to Dick Tracy, an extremely popular comic strip from the 1930s about a yellow-clad detective solving crimes in a colorful, funky version of the 1930s and inevitably mowing down the bad guys after deducing that they’re responsible for some sort of crime. Created in 1931 by Chester Gould and still continuing to this day, Dick Tracy is a phenomenon that several generations of American kids grew up with. Its flashy colors, over the top villains and procedural stories are instantly recognizable, spawning a slew of imitators and even a full motion picture in 1990. Dick Tracy-style detective comics, for a while in the 30s and 40s, became a genre of their own, heavily influencing the noir fiction of the time and solidifying themselves forever in pop culture. To put it in a way that you youngsters can understand, Dick Tracy-style crime strips in the 30s were the superhero comics of the 90s – literally everywhere, and enjoyed by everyone. Hell, there are rumors that when Dick Tracy’s archnemesis died, people were publicly mourning him!

Jack Hammer, naturally, takes many cues from Dick Tracy and the other various comic books of its ilk. The influence is the character designs are obvious – very angular features, sharp, bold colors, ridiculous exaggerations… But it doesn’t just stop there. Look at the design of the Dick Tracy strips:

Numerous panels organized in boxes and separated by a white border. Look familiar? If not, just scroll to the top of the page, to the screenshot from Jack Hammer. Yeah, the folks over at NetEnt managed to recreate Dick Tracy’s iconic comic book style through the use of their slot symbols, which, to me, is absolutely brilliant and speaks of a profound love and understanding for the source material. The fact that a video slot managed to put so much work into not only resembling its inspiration, but recreating it down to the smallest detail while still being fully and completely original, is utterly mindblowing. I can only hope that we see more slots with such strong inspirations popping up – and when they do, I’ll be sure to talk about them!