Lottery operators have to constantly advertise their products to ensure that current players are retained and new players are constantly recruited.
This advertising has to be extremely effective but at the same time conform to restrictive regulatory rules.
Therefore, operators, and the marketing research and advertising agencies they hire, have to be creative in lottery ads.
Knowing the Market
One of the most intensive aspects of lottery advertising is the market research needed and used to actually create ads.
Just like for slot machines, extensive marketing research has to be conducted.
Lottery games are based on themes, quantity of numbers available versus drawn, and other parameters.
Market research is done to determine what types of number quantity/total availability should the lottery be.
Questions That Need to be Asked
What graphics symbols and colour combinations are the right mixtures to target a specific range of player, by either sex, age, or other demographic?
What fonts would work with the graphics? Are the fonts older style to speak to older players, or brand new to target younger players?
What wording would work best in the ad campaign?
What can or can’t be said, what needs to be said, and how it should be said?
Are advertisements talking to men or women or both, a specific age range, or type of player?
How should the ads be? Serious and straight or humourous and maybe a bit twisted?
What would go over better with the type of player they want to keep and attract? Maybe two different ads on the same theme?
Can the ads translate into video, audio, and print without losing any effectiveness, understanding, and intent?
Creating the Ad and Placement
Once this market research is done, the advertising agency has to create the actual ads according to the wishes, desires, and data provided by the operator. And sometimes the more creative the ad, the better the effectiveness it has on players.
The best ads are the ones that are remembered, either for their humour invoking a laugh and positive response from a viewer, listener, or reader, or for their serious treatment of lottery playing and winning that touches the heart of a player.
Where should the ads be positioned? For television and radio, should the ads run weekdays or weekends, morning, afternoon, or evening, and on which shows?
For print, should the targeted media be newspapers, magazines, inserts, or mailings?
What about online advertising? Sometimes these types of ads don’t translate well as websites generally are not the best forums for traditional advertising media.
In this case, should blogs or vlogs be better suited? On the other hand, what about running the ads only on the operators websites?
And is the advertising touting current games, changes in those games, or introducing new games and date debuts?
How often should the ads run per day depending on media?
Are potential current players and new targeted players able to both view the advertising at the selected times or are ads going to have to be run in one set of ads, times, and frequency for current players and at other times and frequency for new players?
As you can see, lottery advertising is not that simple of a project in which an operator can post a sign at a retailer, like “new game here,” and expect it to be a hit or even a mediocre success.
It must be created and positioned properly to be effective and target the current player, new player, or both.
How well all this comes together is the test on whether the game stays, is changed, or is stopped.
And a lot of that hinges on the advertising towards current loyal players and potentially new players.
If successful, revenues increase and more money can be distributed to benefactors.
If not successful, loss of income could occur, a black mark is created against the operator, and charities suffer the loss of support most of all.