Values-Driven Marketing Strategy & Creative Intelligence
Average sentiment score rose from 0.40 to 0.81 across the paid media portfolio after applying values-based creative direction, a direct result of the team acting on research recommendations.
Across all four lines of business, paid assets meeting the Neutral tone threshold delivered click-through rates nearly double those of Neutral-dominant creative.
Safety First signal in the optimal index range (72–96) produced 1.24% CTR versus 0.67% outside it—a 57.7% lift over portfolio average.
Osage Casino Hotel competes in a dense Oklahoma gaming market where every major operator runs paid social, and most of it looks the same: announcement-style graphics, promotional copy, date and logo. The category as a whole skewed Neutral in tone, informational rather than motivational, and no competitor had grounded their messaging in what actually drives their highest-value patrons to engage.
AcrobatAnt was brought in to change that. The mandate was not simply to produce better creative. It was to understand who Osage’s most valuable audience segments truly were, what motivated them at a values level, and how to build a paid media program that reached and resonated with those audiences in a measurably more effective way.
The research started with a two-wave survey of Club Osage members drawn from the active patron pool, one of the most substantive research efforts in the category. AcrobatAnt led the engagement and partnered with Aletheia Marketing & Media to fulfill the primary research and values-specific analysis.
On values alone, the Pleasure audience—socially optimistic and experience-seeking—appeared to be the primary target. But when visit frequency and monthly spend were appended to matched patron records, the picture shifted. Tradition-type patrons emerged as the highest-frequency, highest-spend segment, with high average monthly transactions, long sessions, and loyal return play. This is where the revenue lives.
The Pleasure segment remained important for a different reason. As the most likely to hold multiple club memberships, Pleasure patrons are also the most likely to defect. In a saturated market where every competitor is running paid social, reaching these patrons with generic messaging is not enough to earn their loyalty. Converting competitor-loyal patrons into Osage Casino regulars requires connecting at a values level that the rest of the category is not operating at. That became the mandate: protect and deepen with Tradition, activate and convert Pleasure, and apply a distinct signal recipe for entertainment-specific messaging across both.
Pluralytics™ is a patented behavioral science-powered content intelligence platform built on the Universal Values Model developed by social psychologist Shalom Schwartz. It analyzes language, imagery, video, tone, and emotional cues to determine which audiences messaging appeals to, why it resonates, and how to optimize it for stronger performance. Pluralytics™ is offered through Aletheia Marketing & Media, AcrobatAnt’s partner in audience intelligence and values-driven media strategy. Together, AcrobatAnt and Aletheia use Pluralytics to score creative, build audience benchmarks, and validate performance against the values signals that predict engagement.
For Osage Casino, Connection meant translating patron research into three audience recipes grounded in actual values data, not creative intuition, so every paid asset could be measured against the motivations of the people it was built to reach.
AcrobatAnt and Pluralytics™, a patented behavioral science-powered content intelligence platform, built audience-specific signal benchmarks from the primary research data. Every piece of creative is scored against five values signals: Free Spirit, Global Me, Hearth, Ladder, and Safety First. Each signal reflects a distinct motivational orientation. The combination in play for a given asset determines which audiences it resonates with and why.
Three distinct persona recipes were developed from the data, each mapped to the messaging context where they apply.
Persona 01
Key signals: Hearth + Safety First Highest-value, highest-frequency patron segment. Responds to community identity, familiarity, and belonging. Primary audience for loyalty and retention messaging.
Persona 02
Key signals: Free Spirit + Hearth Over-indexes for multiple club memberships, making them the most switchable segment. Growth and activation audience. Warm, upbeat, experience-forward creative.
Persona 03
Key signals: Free Spirit + Global Me Derived from actual paid media performance data. Applies across channels whenever the message is entertainment-specific. Energy and spontaneity lead.
Across all three personas, Pluralytics analysis confirmed that Warm and Lively tone rather than Neutral-dominant, announcement-style copy consistently produced stronger performance. Top-performing creative read like a recommendation from someone who knows the audience, not a brand speaking at them. Short sentences, direct address, present tense, and positive sentiment became non-negotiable guardrails across all four lines of business.
For Osage Casino, Community meant recognizing that their brand already had something the broader competitive set did not: an authentically warm, welcoming voice rooted in genuine community connection. The work was to protect that identity, prove it in the data, and ensure it showed up consistently across every paid touchpoint.
In March 2026, AcrobatAnt and Pluralytics delivered a competitive intelligence analysis of seven Oklahoma casino competitors, scoring their social assets against the same values signal framework used for Osage Casino. The findings confirmed what the internal data suggested: the competitive category is dominated by Neutral-dominant, graphic-heavy promotional content. Unlike many of the category’s larger gaming brands, Osage Casino’s brand voice was authentically warmer and more community-rooted, giving them a real foundation to connect with patrons who value these traits. The brands closest to Osage in instinct were still not executing the full recipe.
Osage Casino’s Neutral tone sat at 34%, the lowest in the category. The competitor average was 45%. Other key market leaders sat at 58% and 48% Neutral, leaning on the same announcement-style creative that Pluralytics analysis had already identified as a CTR suppressor.
9%
No other brand in the competitive set runs Encouraging tone at a meaningful level. Combined with Warm and Lively presence, this gives Osage a distributed tone palette that competitors cannot replicate by adjusting a single lever.
34%
The category average is 45%. Other key market leaders run significantly higher. Reducing Neutral tone is not a stylistic preference; it is a documented performance variable. Every 10 points above 40% Neutral costs measurable CTR.
One competitor leads the category in Warm tone at 46%, but carries zero Encouraging and only 14% Lively—Warmth without energy, and without the Encouraging signal that distinguishes Osage Casino’s full recipe. Osage Casino’s combination is not just differentiated on paper. The organic content data confirmed it on-platform: community-forward, people-first content, including employer brand, cultural moments, and patron recognition, consistently outperformed graphic-heavy game promotion by a wide margin, regardless of brand.
Hearth signal—rooted in warmth, community, and belonging—is the Tradition audience’s organic trigger and the category whitespace no competitor has fully claimed. No brand in the competitive set integrates Hearth at Pleasure-required levels while sustaining Global Me for entertainment content. That whitespace is Osage Casino’s to hold.
For Osage Casion, Conversion meant closing the loop between research, creative direction, and in-market performance, using Pluralytics scoring to measure whether the signal and tone investments were producing results at the asset level.
The February-through-April 2026 Pluralytics performance analysis scored paid social assets across four lines of business (F&B, Hotel, Promo, and Skyline/Entertainment), covering 98% of paid social impressions during the period. It was the first formal measurement of whether the values-based creative direction had produced results. It had.
Hearth 145 | Safety First 119
Community, familiarity, food experience. Warm tone 58%. Highest CTR of all four LOBs.
Hearth 121 | Warm tone gap largest
Warmth is the primary performance driver. Top-tier Hotel creative ran 58% Warm vs. 23% in bottom performers.
Free Spirit 123 | Ladder 133
Urgency and individuality. High Neutral tone (50% avg.) identified as the primary drag on performance.
Video 3.4x CTR over static
Format drives performance more than signal. Video is non-negotiable for entertainment content.
The November 2025 analysis had flagged low sentiment as a gap across the portfolio. The creative team responded. By February through April 2026, the portfolio average sentiment had risen from 0.40 to 0.81, more than double the prior baseline. Sentiment above 0.6 became standard. The floor moved; the focus shifted to the next lever.
Neutral tone suppression emerged as the single most actionable finding in the dataset. Assets where Neutral tone exceeded 50% of the tone mix delivered 0.48% average CTR. Assets at or below 50% Neutral delivered 0.87%, a 1.8x difference that held across all four lines of business. The suppression began at 40%, not 50%: assets above 40% Neutral showed a 17% CTR penalty, while assets above 50% showed a 33% penalty against static baseline. Graphic-forward, announcement-style creative where copy is minimal or absent is the primary driver of Neutral dominance and the most addressable execution gap in the portfolio.
+41%
Hearth signal at or above 110 combined with sentiment at or above 0.75 delivered +40.5% CTR lift over static baseline. The combination of community signal and positive tone is more predictive than either variable alone.
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The Skyline gap was the starkest finding: video delivered 1.67% CTR versus 0.49% for static, a 3.4x difference. The top four performers in the entire dataset were all Skyline video assets.
Cross-channel validation on Viant DSP display confirmed the same signal and tone patterns held outside of Meta. Mother’s Day F&B creative—combining Hearth 145, sentiment 0.85, and 50% Warm tone—led the display set. One asset carried the highest Hearth score in the entire dataset but fell short on performance because its sentiment score was not aligned. Signal alignment requires all three levers working together: the right values signals, the right tone, and positive sentiment. None of the three is sufficient on its own.
Business performance metrics, including revenue impact, patron acquisition, and ROI, are proprietary to Osage Casino Hotel and are not shared publicly. The Pluralytics findings presented here represent the paid media and creative intelligence layer of the engagement.
