Lotto players range from 18-108 with the bulk of their players older than 45. Because of this 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.

So Lotto wanted to put their money behind another TV ad, which we knew would reach the older Lotto players. But to ensure Lotto’s ongoing brand health we needed the TV ad to be more engaging and relevant online to reach and engage the 18-35 year old market, who don’t watch traditional TV

The client's sales goal was a 1% increase on Saturday draw sales.

(100% of Lotto profits got back to the community)

We created a lotto ad that was also 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. An interactive site turned the search for the Lotto numbers into a game and we drip-fed people clues on social media and even the live draw.

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 gave it a twist that offered a much deeper and exciting experience in social and online 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.

This ad was targeted at New Zealand’s population of 5 million. Lotto saw a 5% sales increase over every draw from the commercial launch to the winner announcement (with each draw sale compared to similar Jackpot months). That's $5.8 million in 2 months. 6x the production budget. Social engagement inflated 421%. For something like this millions of views are expected- but it was the time people were taking that surprised us. We couldn’t track their dwell time searching on their TVs, Youtube and the Facebook video, but we could track the 216,000 visits to the site. Each 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.