Maryland Lottery & Gaming
Gail Pelovitz, Assistant Director of Communications for Events & Contracts, Maryland Lottery & Gaming
What events (fairs, festivals, concerts) will you sponsor/engage with this year? If applicable, what physical presence will you have at the event?
The Maryland Lottery will be on-site at nearly 100 events this year. At most events, our sponsorship includes an on-site presence and other promotional opportunities like social media mentions, tickets to give away on our social media platforms, an ad in the event program, and our logo placed throughout the event.
At some events, our sponsorship also includes an opportunity for members of our Communications team to go on stage and engage with the crowd, discussing current Lottery news, jackpots, and second-chance promotions, while playing games with the crowd like Show Me or Pick 5. For Show Me, we have a list of items, and the first person in the crowd who shows that item receives a scratch-off ticket. For Pick 5, people are picked from the crowd to list five things (i.e., “list five Lottery games”) to receive a scratch-off.
We attend too many events to list them all, but we are on-site for a wide variety of fairs, music festivals, charity events, and sports events. By far the largest is the Maryland State Fair, which runs for 14 days in late August and early September. The Lottery is set up in the front lobby of an exhibition hall. In addition to our prize wheel, we have a retailer on-site running four terminals and selling from dozens of scratch-off facings. We also have two self-service vending machines and a stay-and-play area with high-top tables and monitors displaying our two monitor games, Keno and Racetrax.
The State Fair sponsorship also includes the opportunity for us to bring lottery winners to the fair to win cash prizes. We typically hold a “Points for Drawings” promotion through our My Lottery Rewards player loyalty program to select the winners who will participate in our State Fair event. In 2024, we plan to select ten winners who will each win a cash prize and five passes to the fair. In an event that we will hold at the fair, one of the ten winners will get to go into our money machine for the opportunity to grab as many $1,000 bills as they can in 30 seconds.
In the past few years, have you made any changes to your event strategy that were either a success or a failure? What did you learn?
We have not made many changes to our strategy lately. We have been trying to promote our events more on social media. A few days prior to some of our larger events, we post on our Facebook page to let people know we’ll be there.
If you have a physical presence at an event, what types of activations/engagement opportunities do you employ and why?
- Do you incorporate a prize wheel? Have you tried any other form of game?
- Do you sell tickets?
- Do you use a selfie booth?
- Anything else?
The Communications team brings our prize wheel to all events. Anyone 18 or older can spin for free to win a Lottery promotional item, and we make scratch-off tickets available as one of the items on the wheel for some of the larger events. Going to as many events as we do gives us a great opportunity to meet a wide variety of people and gives everyone a positive interaction with the Lottery. We bring one of our retailers to sell tickets on-site at some of our larger events. Event space is typically a 10’ x 10’ or 10’ x 20’ tent, but for some events, we have a larger area.
Do you have certain KPIs you measure success with for events?
We do not have any KPIs we measure. We do get feedback from staff who work at the events regarding whether it was successful or not and if we should return.