They came, if you really want the whole story, from Jimmy O'Brien.
Just the Ticket
Around the halls of Scientific Games, people invariably smile when you mention Jimmy O'Brien. It's a smile that says, "Now, that guy's a character." And when they're done smiling, they'll say something like, "He's a genius," and they'll mean it. Here, the story of his career at the Massachusetts lottery has acquired the dimensions of myth.
Steve Saferin, left, and Jimmy O'Brien with some of the 17 billion scratch lottery tickets that Scientific Games prints each year for state governments.
(Erik S. Lesser For The Washington Post)
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O'Brien, 58, was hired by Scientific Games three years ago and splits his time between Alpharetta and his home in Burlington, Mass. Right now, he's here in an office without windows, which adds to the sense that he doesn't get a lot of sun. He looks like a math professor who could use a vacation, and he speaks softly, bashfully, with a thick Boston accent. There are a dozen cans of Diet Coke on the table and a tin of peanuts, plus a spool of paper spilling out the back of an adding machine. He often works here 20 hours a day, without breaks.
"We bring him food sometimes because he'll forget to eat," says Jennifer Welshons, Scientific Games' director of research, who works down the hall. "He gets that focused."
O'Brien will detail his life in the lottery with a wistful grin, but he seems genuinely uncomfortable with even a bit of limelight and he takes pains to credit his colleagues as well as the elected officials above him. Those officials, however, think of O'Brien as one of the state's great unsung heroes.
"The day we hired Jimmy O'Brien was a great day for Massachusetts," says Bob Crane, the state treasurer for 27 years, now retired, and the guy who oversaw the birth of the state's lottery in the 1970s. "He was quiet, he never boasted, but it wasn't long before we realized he was always right and always ahead of the rest of the world."
The scratch card was actually invented by the people who founded Scientific Games, and had its public debut in 1974. But after a decent start, the product kind of spluttered. For years, it was like a side dish for players who much preferred the gargantuan sums that were at least mathematically possible in Lotto-type games.
That changed in 1979 when the Massachusetts lottery put a help-wanted ad in the newspaper, searching for a marketing guy with a statistics background. O'Brien, then a Marks-A-Lot pen salesman with an MBA, got the job. His boss told him that scratch ticket sales were so poor there was talk of just phasing them out.
"They were considered dead in the water," O'Brien says, leaning back in his chair. "But I looked at them and I thought, they just weren't marketing them right. They were focused on other things."
O'Brien began to give the system what can only be described as a total body overhaul. First he studied the prize structure. On a typical scratch game, the state handed back about 30 cents of every dollar in prize money, most of it $1 and $2 at a time. There were a handful of $10,000 winners, but they were so rare that few players were enticed by them.
"People thought it was a sucker's bet," says O'Brien, who would conduct dozens and dozens of focus groups over the years. "They wanted the excitement of gambling, and they weren't getting that."
So O'Brien dramatically increased the number of payoffs in the $40 to $100 range. The bulk of all prizes were still $1 and $2, but there were enough mid-size winners to generate what's called "chatter money" -- buzz that tempts others to play. The change meant jacking up the total amount of prize money. So O'Brien recommended an idea that for the lottery world was radical: He raised payoffs to 45 cents on the dollar. Then higher and higher. Yes, the state would take in less from each ticket, but if many more tickets were sold they'd cover the shortfall, and then some.
This might sound like Retail 101, but lotteries were risk-averse in the early 1980s, worried mostly about security and the sort of accounting glitches that lead to unpleasant headlines. There were a lot of former FBI agents in the business then. The emphasis was on squeaky cleanness, not innovation.
To ensure that people knew about the higher payoffs, O'Brien slapped phrases like "1000 $1000 winners!" on the tickets in big bold letters. He had the cards reconfigured so that if there were 12 chances to win, you could win 12 times. Every card had to be "good to the last scratch." Eventually he started selling more than one game at a time, introducing cards with gambling themes, entertainment themes, holiday themes.
