The Juegos Instantaneos (also known as “Scratch and Win” or Instant Win Games) are the most popular Lottery game in Puerto Rico, but its sales were down 10.6% vs. the previous year. Research showed that this was due to the arrival of the new “Powerball” lottery, which has a very attractive selling point: a weekly prize of hundreds of millions. There was a lot of urgency to turn these numbers around.

The Instantaneos offer our target the a chance to dream. That insight became the starting point for our strategy: we compete with other forms of cheap escapes such as beer, cigarettes and reading entertainment sections of a tabloid. Simply put, the way to increase sales was to go beyond the lottery and into the realm of “entertainment.”

That’s why our strategy required us to speak, not as a traditional lottery that offers the remote possibility of immense riches, but as a fun activity that offers instant gratification.

We wanted to be in the celebrity section of daily tabloids and magazines—it’s the place that people browse through when they seek a brief escape from their daily lives. We inserted ourselves there to showcase how the Instantaneo is the perfect way to dream on a daily basis: it's instant entertainment that can also change your day for the better.

We created "scratch off" stories and printed them using the same technology, inks and cardboard used in our product. In these stories the protagonist's fate changed for good by just scratching off certain spots. They were inserted on national newspapers in tabloid and entertainment sections and also made available in kiosks where lottery games are sold. While newspapers allowed consumers to experience what it's like to play the game, inserts at the POS allowed customers to feel what could happen if they just played and how their day could change in an instant.

A total of 300K inserts were created; all distributed in local newspapers and point of sale in a week's time.

Instant Stories produced instantaneous results. Sales grew from $690,988 the week prior to $1,118,282 on the week when the effort launched, a 39% increase.

Ultimately, we proved that allowing consumers to experience how their day can change in an instant was the most efficient way to re-connect them with our game.