The mission of the New York Lottery (NYL) is to help fund education across New York. The state relies heavily on NYL for financial support. But in early 2020 New York was one of the epicenters of the COVID-19 crisis and NYL faced rapidly declining sales. Fewer people commuting to work and shopping meant fewer people buying our products. Sales—and thus revenue for New York State—were declining.

But as New York began easing restrictions, NYL needed to put their foot back on the gas pedal to drive sales. We were tasked with creating a new product to get things turned around. This new product needed to not only kick-start sales but galvanize the state’s entire population.

The idea was to turn the simple act of playing a Scratch-Off game into an act of state pride.

To do this, we emblazoned five ticket faces with iconic scenes from around the state aptly named “The New York Series.” Buying into the “New York Series” meant New Yorkers were at once getting a piece of the state and also investing in its renewal.

New Yorkers’ unprecedented love for their state deserved unprecedented design. Traditionally, Scratch-Off games are characterized by off-the-shelf clip-art designs. The conventional rules are to make them loud, colorful and gaudy; or to add lots of dollar signs and pictures of cash. We threw out the rules and asked a local artist to create a more artful Scratch-Off ticket, designed to stand out in retail environments that are cluttered and overly colorful.

The New York Lottery is brand with a conventional playbook that’s been working for over 50 years. But never before had the state experienced something quite like a global pandemic. Suddenly, what a lottery ticket represented – wealth, money, escapism – wasn’t what New Yorkers valued in that moment.

The clients asked for campaign to make up for lost sales, but what they really needed was a bridge from lights off to “business as usual.”

So, we broke the rules to create The New York Series – a limited edition game that tapped into the fierce love New Yorkers have for their state when it’s at its worst. In short, our strategy was to transform the act of playing a scratch off game into an act of state pride.

We knew a conventional lottery game (with loud, neon designs and themes of money/wealth) wouldn’t be right for the moment. So, we developed an entirely new product. One that didn’t appeal to New Yorkers desire for cash, but to something more emotional.

We worked with local NY artist to design a series of tickets from the ground up. Rather than a traditional overly colorful ticket, we rendered ours in meticulously delicate black and white line art. Each ticket represented a famous icon or majestic region from New York State and even included diverse representations of its population.

The intention of designing in black and white was to create a work of art that popped off the shelves and signaled our very singular message of New York pride.

The New York Series proved to strike the right balance between emotional storytelling and product appeal. Despite a challenging sales period, overall brand opinion rose 6% and positive social sentiment rose to 91.82% during while the New York Series was in market. The tickets themselves performed better than any other $5 Scratch-Off Game since 2019. Not to mention generating over $24 million dollars in sales to help fund education in New York State.

As for softer metrics, NYL received numerous phone calls, letters and emails from residents across New York State with requests for posters of the tickets and overall praise of the campaign.

In many ways, New York Series served as an updated blueprint for successful product launches for New York Lottery. It was a potent reminder of the importance of letting human insight guide product development and, of course, the story we tell about those products.