South Carolina Education Lottery (SCEL) is featuring its own scholarship recipients in its new FY22 beneficiary advertising campaign. Featured in the TV ads are an ICU nurse, a National Guardsman and a high school teacher.
“We believe in each beneficiary telling their story. There are no scripts and we do not feed them lines. The voices heard are theirs and we want them to tell their stories in their own words. We then add a corporate voice over at the end tying the spot back to the lottery’s mission,” said Josh Whiteside, Director, Marketing, SCEL.
The lottery went on location to film the ads at the employee’s workplace. “We shot these on location at the high school where our teacher Katie works, in a hospital for the Kennedy spot and then a local location for Keenan our National Guardsman,” said Whiteside.
Throughout the year, SCEL shifts focus for its mass media messaging away from product-related ad and focuses on telling the SCEL beneficiary message. “In South Carolina, the vast majority of our proceeds fund college scholarships for students in the state. These most recent commercials are an extension of our most recent beneficiary campaign ‘Your Passion is Our Purpose.’ We wanted to focus on the front line COVID workers who also are SC Education Lottery Scholarship recipients,” said Whiteside.
“We find that letting people tell their stories about how lottery funded scholarships have helped them through school and made it a little easier when coming out of school helps us relate and humanize what we do. Raising funds for education sometimes gets lost in the overall thought of what we do and we want to make sure we put a major emphasis on our mission. There are many people in the state who have received Lottery-funded scholarships, but don’t even know that the Lottery funds them! Since they are called LIFE, SC Hope, and Palmetto Fellows Scholarships, it’s not entirely obvious all the time that we’re associated with them. These stories help build that bridge,” he added.
The ads are performing extremely well. “We take much pride in developing these spots and contribute a hefty chunk of our marketing budget to beneficiary. We feel the strategy helps tie together our mission to our games. We have found great success in our beneficiary spots helping people understand that the Scholarships and tuition assistance they receive come from lottery funding,” he said.
These beneficiary ads are heavily featured in the social space.