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    Round Up: 2023 Marketing Strategies

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    South Carolina Lottery – Cash Pop, Livin’ Lucky, Acquisition

    Josh Whiteside, Director of Marketing

    We are extremely proud of our Cash Pop campaign we launched early last year. Taking a unique and modern approach to advertising by creating a lifestyle brand for our consumers, we saw fantastic sales and heavy interest in the game. This lifestyle-take on the game was very vague on the game characteristics and gameplay, but that did not hold our consumers back from playing or understanding. Cash Pop has continued to thrive throughout the year, which helped us launch a second campaign that focused more on gameplay later in the year.

    We are currently excited about the Livin’ Lucky with Luke Combs promotion that will launch for us in March around our $5 scratch-off. We have a ton planned with events around the state and can’t wait to see this promotion come to life.

    For us, being a cash-only, no-online-sales state, we will heavily focus on player acquisition through our new rewards program that will launch this summer. This will help us gain some crucial insights into our consumers playing habits and help us understand what drives our players. We are really looking forward to finding out what happens to those infrequent players who enter our space after a large jackpot run. How do we keep them engaged in Lottery when the jackpots drop off?

    Massachusetts Lottery – 50th Anniversary

    Ed Farley, Chief Marketing Officer

    Our 50th Anniversary campaign was a celebration of our customers, retailers, employees, and the communities that the Lottery supports… What we are most proud of with this campaign, titled “50 Years of Winning,” was its authenticity. The campaign featured real people sharing personal stories about what the Lottery has meant to them. We conducted and filmed over a dozen interviews, utilized our photo and video archives, and produced most of the campaign ourselves.

    We are very excited about the advertising campaign, we are building to support the launch of our first $50 instant ticket, Billion Dollar Extravaganza. The theme of the campaign is a major motion picture premiere with the ticket being the star attraction. Our in-house creative team is producing the TV spot, which resembles a trailer for a much-anticipated blockbuster film. We’re carrying the movie theme a step further, giving a nod to iconic movie moments with reenacted scenes starring Lottery employees as the actors. Each of these scenes is a celebratory moment featuring the ticket as the hero.

    We are developing a significantly enhanced promotion and loyalty program that will allow us to engage with our customers. Components of this effort include unifying the two mobile apps that we currently have and introducing digital couponing for the first time.

    Louisiana Lottery – Shake it Up & Experiential Promotions

    M. Quinn Dossett, Vice President, Marketing

    Probably our $3 Shake It Up! Campaign in February 2022 was my favorite. The reason is that this ticket is unique to Louisiana. For the second time, we partnered with Louisiana favorite, Tony Chachere’s Creole Seasoning, this time to commemorate their 50th Anniversary. The first strategic alliance we worked on together was in 2015, with our $2 Spice It Up! Campaign. The ticket featured Tony’s iconic green can as the scratch area. We included an extensive advertising and promotional campaign to go along with it. That ticket went on to index at 152 and win the Best Instant Ticket Award at NASPL that year. So, when Tony’s reached out to us about another alliance for their 50th anniversary, we were absolutely excited and jumped right in. This time we decided to “shake things up” a bit and chose to create a two-scene ticket featuring Tony’s retro logo from when they first launched, as well as the current logo they use today. We set the ticket at a $3 price point this time. We usually launch crossword and bingo games at that price but have been experimenting with different play styles for the last couple of years. While we did not incorporate any extra media spend into this campaign, it did become the highlighted campaign of the spring. In congress with Tony’s, we scripted and produced a live-action, with animation, television spot featuring the beloved character from the can, Little Tony, shaking things up at a Louisiana food festival by magically changing a dispenser facing full of Louisiana Lottery tickets to the Shake It Up! Tickets, much to the delight of festivalgoers. We even filmed the spot in our own parking lot with our promotional activation vehicle, LOLA, and Tony Chachere’s brought in their huge food truck to add to the setting. Of course, we hit all touchpoints in advertising throughout the state and coupled that media with an aggressive promotional schedule of in-store and social media promotions where players posted a photo of themselves with a scratch-off and their favorite dish to use the seasoning on. The ticket ended up being another resounding success, on sale for 35 weeks and indexing at 174!

    We have a lot of great advertising and promotional plans for the coming year, but the one I have to say I am excited the most for is our upcoming Livin’ Lucky with Luke Combs $5 ticket. Experiential promotions are an area we definitely want to expand and do more of and this promotion plays into that strategy well . . . We will support this promotion with all our media channels and some fun merchandise, country music radio station promotions, and other prizes.

    I do not think it is a stretch to say that the lottery industry as a whole shares the same acquisition and retention strategies. We just may each go about it a little differently or at our own pace. For Louisiana, the trick is not to alienate our loyal players that fall into a certain core age range, and who have their preferences with regard to play styles, games that are offered, promotions, communication, and any other aspect of their play. But, you also cannot ignore the customer you are depending on tomorrow or down the road. These “emerging market” or desired customers that you hope to become loyal players for years to come have different preferences or interests, as it relates to their spending dollars. More and more we are finding that these demographics are also interested in technology, added-value, and experiences. An integration or balance of what has worked in the past and what your future customers want for their spending is crucial to your lottery’s success. Advanced analytics, enhanced customer engagement, and extended play experiences are some of the tools we will be employing this year at the Louisiana Lottery.

    New Hampshire Lottery – Locality, Conversions

    Maura McCann, Director of Marketing

    What advertising campaign were you most proud of last year?

    Love such an easy question or maybe it’s the stellar campaign that makes it an easy answer.

    Our holiday campaign 2022 featuring “NH Nick”. I have watched that spot we produced repeatedly and the spinoffs of radio, social posts, and more – just an all-around great, great campaign. Already has me thinking about what we can do for a sequel, holiday 2023. The cinematography, featuring NH Nick riding his vintage motorcycle up our coastline, through our lakes region and past the mountains as I am a big believer in locality– having players identify with those locations–all before we get to what the spot is all about, keeping them engaged. You see his white beard, wearing a red leather jacket, riding a motorcycle in lieu of a sleigh, and delivers with flair, scratch ticket bundles as gifts to front porches and stoops – culminating in the messaging regarding all of our products making great gifts for the holidays.

    What is the most critical customer acquisition trend/strategy/tool for lotteries to implement in 2023?

    Often, the best solution to a problem is the simplest one. And with that in mind, we always believe that the most important customer acquisition tactic is simplifying the path to conversion, and with it, making sure that the path to measuring conversions across channels is simple and effective as well.

    This can come together in a number of ways; including optimizing the website experience and shortening the path as to where to play and/or where to sign up and play lottery games as much as possible. It also involves making sure that calls-to-action are clear across owned and paid media channels so that potential customers clicking through know what they’re supposed to do and where to go when they arrive on a web page. It sounds obvious, but it can sometimes get overlooked as you’re thinking about new trends, channels and targeting strategies. It’s also something that can and should be optimized based on the sources of your traffic and how they’re interacting with your content. That’s why being able to segment and measure across each channel and tactics is so important!

    For the New Hampshire Lottery, we keep in mind the simple path to conversion noted above while leveraging our most efficient and effective customer acquisition tools — SEM and Social. Using a combination of these lower funnel strategies while also using higher funnel channels including broadcast, Out-of-Home, CTV and digital display allows these to work together to generate conversions!

    These efforts speak to traditional/in-store play as well as online play.

    Kentucky Lottery – Jackpots = Player Funnel

    Edie Frakes, Vice President of Marketing

    Lotteries must capitalize on the recent gigantic jackpot runs with Powerball and Mega Millions and keep the new and occasional players we may have picked up in the player funnel. We have to continue to engage them with offers and winning experiences outside just the “OMG” sums of money the jackpot offerings have, which means cross-promoting iLottery, Scratch and other draw games.

    West Virginia Lottery – First Social Media/ Influencer Campaign

    Danielle Snidow, Deputy Director, Marketing

    We were very pleased with our first paid Social Media/ Influencer campaign, in which we partnered with three West Virginia Haunted Places to spread the word about the Run, Scream, Hide Campaign. The results were phenomenal and we sold out at the warehouse for the $2 Scream ticket and the $5 Run ticket in record time.

    We will continue the combination of paid social media (Facebook and Instagram) in partnership with an influencer campaign. We are currently running a WWE campaign on social along with a social-only second chance drawing utilizing Woobox to select the winner for the SummerSlam Elimination Challenge (six-week WWE tickets social-based second chance drawing).

    We are utilizing Facebook/Woobox to collect email addresses through Social Contests which we will utilize when we launch iLottery.

    Oregon Lottery – Win For Life

    Shad Barnes, Senior Manager, Digital Marketing

    This spring we are running a small campaign for our Win For Life draw game that has had a very flat sales curve for several years. We don’t often do much advertising for low volume/low engagement products, but this is an opportunity for us to test some tactics utilizing our owned channels along with a small budget campaign to see what levers are truly effective. Because the sales have been very predictable, we’ll be able to learn so much and also increase our fluidity and working acumen with our analytics and insights department.

    The most important thing lotteries need to work towards is owning their relationship with their customer! Not just getting their email, but learning the buying, responsible gaming, and communication preferences of your players. It must be a secure, incremental process but as it gains steam, the convergence of the elements (funnel, insights, communication, internal growth, cost savings, etc.) will be incredibly powerful. It’ll never completely replace advertising, but without a strong, strategic-owned channel, Lotteries are missing the most important tool in their creative rotation.