In Lebanon, the economic crisis has reached unprecedented levels of severity. With the inflation rates soaring, the national currency has plummeted, losing a staggering 98% of its value.

The collapse of the banking system has further exacerbated the situation, compelling even the national lottery to dispense its prizes in giant mounds of cash due to the scarcity of banking services.

Facing a decline in its regular players amidst this turmoil, the national Loto wanted to restore faith in the possibility of winning and to instill a renewed sense of optimism for the future through its jackpot.

How do you prove to the population that winning the jackpot isn’t this far-fetched crazy idea? Well- the numbers don’t lie.

We brought in a mathematician to demonstrate the analytics, using comparative analogies that are relatable to the Lebanese population and easy to swallow and understand. Every citizen knows the struggle of the lack of electricity, or the number of potholes that harass our vehicles on the streets on an everyday basis.

We started by hijacking a show - our own. A real mathematician (The only one who had previously published a book about the Lebanese lottery odds) was brought in to crash our weekly national lottery program and give the nation a much-needed reality check.

His absurd equations resulted with headlines and numbers that highlight these odds.

The odds of winning the lottery’s jackpot are 1 out of 5,245,786 – which is an absurd number… but what makes it even more absurd is the fact that you’re more likely to score those odds than you are to see your country get fixed.

Most Lebanese people think winning the jackpot is completely impossible, but the fact is: impossible realities are occurring all the time around them, more impossible than cashing out with the lottery. The people are incredibly strong always finding ways around the crazy situations they’re put through – no president? No problem, life goes on as normal. No electricity? They’ve installed solar panels and batteries in their homes.

Given this incredible resilience, we wanted to prove to them that winning the lottery is simply not impossible, and to give them hope in the game once more.

We started by hijacking our show live and introducing the mathematician who, with a bizarre equation, proved to the Lebanese that they would have more of a chance to win the jackpot than to avoid a pothole in the country.

The mathematician's show-hijacking stunt was shared extensively on all platforms on social media. For every time the mathematician came up with a bizarre equation on broadcast and online, we transformed the result into outdoor ads and print executions.

We then invited social media users to create their own odds, providing a platform for them to almost vent and express themselves amidst our challenging everyday realities, creating joy out of an otherwise very stressful situation.

Our campaign garnered a 22% increase in lottery ticket sales, and also increased the national lottery’s website click-through rates by around 23%, where users can play online.

We achieved a 32% increase in online engagement on social media platforms through asking followers to input their own ideas of odds.

And of course: we had made playing the lottery fun again for everybody.