photo by Ryan Donnell

Last October, Gordon Medenica was in New York for an industry conference when the calls started coming in. As lead director of Mega Millions, the multi-state consortium he’s been overseeing since 2017, Medenica was the man to ask about a jackpot that had swollen to a record $1.5 billion. “The day before the big drawing, I think I did eight different interviews—Today, CBS, CNN, you name it,” he says. Most days, however, it’s behind-the-scenes work for Medenica, whose experience includes a five-year stint leading the New York Lottery; in 2015 he was appointed director of lottery and gaming for the State of Maryland. A media executive earlier in his career, including 16 years at the New York Times Company, Medenica was drawn by the scale of an industry with estimated annual revenues of over $80 billion, in addition to the challenge of injecting “business DNA” into a state agency.

“Mega Millions is run as a consortium by 11 member states: Georgia oversees the televised drawings, for example, while Virginia handles the money transfers between states, based on where the winner lives. That’s carried over into our agreement with Powerball: In 2010, we decided to cross-sell each other’s games. It’s something the industry accomplished by working together.”

“Maybe 20 percent of my time is devoted to different aspects of Mega Millions. Just one example: We’re fighting these parasitic lotteries that basically trade on our brand image and claim they’re selling Mega Millions tickets, when in reality they’re taking bets on the outcome of our game. So we’re fighting trademark battles, even as we have efforts well under way to develop the game internationally.”

“When I started as director of the New York Lottery, I was encouraged to run it like a business. That’s always stuck with me. But the process is extremely cumbersome—the state budget-setting exercises get down into the weeds of our operation, but they only look at the cost side, not the revenue side. So it’s a challenge. We try to stay as apolitical as we can.”

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