In New Zealand Lotto is famous for their TV ads. The national newspaper even writes a story when the new one comes out... so people were expecting a TV ad...

but we wanted to reward their engagement by transforming the traditional TV ad into the product itself...

100% of Lotto new Zealand profits go back to the community. Lotto New Zealand was created as a way to fund over 3000 community and national causes.

Good sales for Lotto mean more funding.

Lotto tend to spend the majority of their budget on a big TV ad every year, because they see the results. In fact, the ‘Imagine’ campaign of TV commercials are continuously rated as New Zealand’s favourite ads and have achieved Grande Effie winning business results.

They do this by driving sales during low jackpot months when sales often dip.

But this year we wanted to take the brand engagement deeper and ensure Lotto’s ongoing brand health in a growing digital landscape. We needed to leverage the popularity of the TV to help us engage people in the digital space.

We just did a big TV ad like we always do...

...and then a month after the release we revealed that the ad itself was actually a Lotto ticket.

Just like a lotto draw there were 8 Lotto numbers, which were hidden throughout the ad. People needed to find 7 to create their ticket and be in to win a grand prize, or 10 runner up cash prizes.

This idea of searching for the ticket was baked into the entire story of the ad. So the main character was searching for her lost ticket, and the audience was searching for a ticket of their own.

The Lotto audience ranges from 18-100.

The bulk of the players are older and watch traditional TV.

We knew we had to put the majority of the budget into a TV ad but we wanted something that would get the media talking, engage people on TV and offer a much deeper and exciting experience in non-traditional media.

We didn’t reveal the idea when we launched the ad on June 21st. The National newspaper even wrote a glowing article about the new ad without knowing there was more to it.

On July 21st, a month later, we leaked the idea and they followed up with another article.

We also announced the hidden idea behind the ad on the National Live Lotto Draw.

So we had the main Lotto ad of the year running on TV, Youtube and social channels.

Which was also a Lotto ticket and which you could search through on an interactive website that turned the search into a game. If you were stuck you could get clues on the Lotto facebook page and we even took over the National Draw for every week during the Promotion to give out a new clue each draw.

In 2 months Lotto saw an increase in sales of $5.8 million from the commercial launch to the winner announcement. (with each draw sale compared to similar Jackpot months). Social engagement inflated 421%. 216,000 people spent an average of 5:47 minutes looking for the numbers, with 53,000 people taking the time to find seven numbers and entering the draw. 30,000 of those even opted-in for marketing emails.

So, in just 3 weeks, on the site alone, people spent 872 days interacting with the brand on a more intimate level. (this doesn’t include on their TV, youtube and facebook, which we could not measure)

The deeper level of engagement had long term benefits with a 6% increase over top of client target for growth in the following 6 months.