Suffering from declining sales, the Mega Millions lottery game needed to relaunch and hype up its new higher jackpot. The problem was, winning a $40 million jackpot can seem like a fantasy that could never happen. So, to make the possibility of winning feel more real, we created a real-life product demo: Aunt Edith, an elderly woman who had her dream of being a rap star fulfilled when she won the new $40 million jackpot. She may not have actually won, but we set out to make it feel that way and show Mega Millions hopeful winners what a taste of big-money living is like. We enlisted a Grammy-winning producer to help cut Aunt Edith’s debut EP and produce her own real music video, all making this dream of hers feel very real and giving the Mega Millions game a much-needed buzz and boost in sales.

Leveraging our target’s interest in hip-hop, we created a campaign around Aunt Edith’s dream, and we didn’t half-step it; we made it feel real by putting a Grammy-winning producer behind her EP and creating a full-length music video. The project lived on Spotify, Apple Music, and Pandora, while social media channels drove people to play online.

The Aunt Edith Mega Millions campaign launched on 10/27/17 and ran through 11/26/17. We created both :30 and :60 TV spots that ran on statewide broadcast TV in Georgia, Ohio, Rhode Island, Iowa, and West Virginia. Also, :60 radio spots ran on local radio buys throughout Georgia, Ohio, Rhode Island, Iowa, and West Virginia.

For her debut track, “40 Million,” we produced a two-minute music video. The video, along with other social posts, ran on Instagram, Facebook, Spotify, Pandora, Shazam, YouTube, BuzzFeed, the Georgia Lottery website, and in-store POS.

Starting as a campaign for the Georgia Lottery, the campaign was eventually picked up by five other state lotteries to run in their markets. A partnership with Shazam allowed consumers to be directed to the full EP when they saw the commercial. Total campaign impressions across Pandora, Spotify, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram reached nearly 40 million.

The Aunt Edith campaign was based around a musical artist: Aunt Edith aka Megan McFarland. And her originally produced and performed hip-hop songs were at the heart of the entire campaign.

Our target was “sometime-y” players who might not have considered themselves a “lottery player,” but got interested when the jackpot got high enough. So, we set out to hype up the bigger jackpot by making winning seem like a real possibility. And we set out to show that just like bigger jackpots, $40 million is big enough to make dreams come true.

Sales and interest in the Mega Millions lottery game were down. Many players weren’t interested in the $15 million jackpots and only started playing when the jackpots grew much higher. So, the game structure was changed to have a higher starting jackpot of $40 million. However, we needed to get the news out in a big way to get people interested and make them understand that while $40 million wasn’t as big as many jackpots, it was still “life-changing” money.