Don't worry about the government

Lotteries often involve various levels of public-private partnership. While the public sector takes the revenue from the lotteries, there is heavy reliance on the private sector to actually run the games and advertise them.

In some cases, the public-private partnerships can get pretty interesting.

Take Atlantic Lottery, which describes itself as follows:

Atlantic Lottery is a public corporation owned by the governments of Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, and Newfoundland and Labrador. In addition to the more than $345 million awarded in prizes last year, Atlantic Lottery also returned 100% of its profits – that’s more than $389 million – to the four Atlantic Provinces.

So how does Atlantic Lottery get players into the games? Well, since I'm writing about Atlantic Lottery in this blog, you could probably guess who one of its partners is. Here's a portion of the press release:

CARLSBAD, Calif. (RestaurantNews.com) NTN Buzztime, Inc. (NYSE Amex: NTN), a leading social entertainment and integrated marketing platform for bars and restaurants throughout the United States and Canada, announced that the company is providing bar trivia games in nine of Atlantic Lottery’s (AL) Coasters locations in the Canadian province of New Brunswick.

Coasters are gaming entertainment centers in bar settings – offering a superior gaming experience for players. Coasters will benefit from the strategic bar marketing solutions and interactive sports, cards and trivia games. This includes the addition of Compte a rebours – a game that’s entirely in the French language. Buzztime and Atlantic Lottery are excited to have future plans that will pit Coasters locations against one another in unique interactive challenges, with prizing awarded to the winning Coasters location.

I have no idea what a Coasters is like, but presumably it's a little more inviting than what we have here in California - namely, a 7 Eleven convenience store with a TV screen showing "this isn't really Keno" games.