Among the earliest adopters of advanced analytics were companies in the hospitality and entertainment industry, and many of those firms have become quite skilled in their use of loyalty programs, direct marketing strategies, and customer upgrades. Casinos in particular have pushed the innovation envelope in using their data to boost revenues. To that end, the membership or loyalty cards that casinos offer have been instrumental in implementing permission-based data collection. Those programs provide an effective mechanism to provide customers with offerings in an accurate and contextual way, with the goal of getting people to spend more time at a casino (and therefore more time gambling).

Consider the following hypothetical example. You walk into a casino and insert your loyalty card into a slot machine. The casino can now identify your presence and retrieve historical data on the length of time you tend to play, the type of machine you prefer...