The brief was to launch a new $30 Scratch-Off Game called, “Black Titanium.” The objectives were to establish the ticket as a unique item worthy of its high price point, and to create a sense of hype to drive purchase. The advertising needed to recreate the fanfare normally reserved for highly desirable limited-edition products.

But the name of the product itself didn’t telegraph its uniqueness. When you hear the words “Black Titanium,” you might think of an exclusive new credit card, a coffee blend, or even a heavy metal band. So instead of avoiding the ambiguous name of the ticket, we leaned into it.

Our brains naturally fill in the blank, so without any context people were more likely to assume “Black Titanium” was a heavy metal band instead of a new Scratch-Off from New York Lottery. So instead of trying fight the misconception, we used it as an advantage to pique people’s interest. We created a fake band named “Black Titanium” and put it on Spotify, along with a fake album. But the songs were actually musical ads for the New York Lottery and the real Black Titanium Scratch-Off. With song titles like, “Hot Cash” and “Fat Stack City,” each song was crafted to get listeners hyped for the Black Titanium ticket while taking them through a heavy metal-fueled journey that would hopefully leave them moshing on top of a giant pile of money.

Traditionally in New York State, sales of Scratch-Offs Games are driven by conventional media— specifically TV ads. But this Scratch-Off had a higher price point and a different audience. The target considered themselves trendsetters and pioneers. They were big consumers of streaming media and were always on the look-out for the latest product drop or new release. We needed to have the impact of a limited-edition product release, so we knew there had to some element of discovery to our message. We couldn’t hit the target over the head with a TV ad. We had to pique their interest and build a world around the ticket in order to give people a reason to purchase it.

We launched our fake band, called “Black Titanium,” on Spotify as if they had just dropped a new album. We drove to their artist page via Spotify ads and social posts, but when listeners got there, they learned “Black Titanium” wasn’t a band at all. And the songs were actually heavy metal ads that rocked.

Since these songs were intended to be Lottery ads that entertain, we needed to be authentic to heavy metal genre. We needed killer guitar solos, tongue-in-cheek lyrics and earth-shattering vocals. We even went as far as to get a real heavy metal vocalist. That’s Terry Ilous singing lead. He co-founded the absolutely real 90s band XYZ and later fronted another hit-making group, Great White.

Our musical tracks launched 10/15/19 and were designed specifically to run on Spotify. These tracks, along with corresponding lyric videos, were promoted across all social platforms (TW/FB/IG/YT) including IGTV.

Our mobile ad units had click-through rates that were 5x above Spotify benchmarks, and our fake band audio ad units had click-through rates that were 2x above Spotify benchmarks.

Black Titanium saw a 22.5% sales increase over the New York Lottery’s previous $30 ticket

With a keen focus on putting our customers first in both our messaging and our media strategies, we’ve observed a noticeable impact on NYL’s business. Compared to when we started working with the New York Lottery, we’ve managed to help increase both overall sales as well as aid to the state’s educational funds.

• 6.19% more in sales compared to 2015

o 60 million more in sales compared to 2015

• 5% increase in aid to education compared to 2015

o 17 million more in aid compared to 2015