With more and more tech-savvy young people living their lives so closely attached to digital screens and mobile phones, we needed to find a new way to engage with them.
So, rather than create communication urging people to enter the lottery, we gave them a new way to play. We challenged the age-old practice of picking a lottery ticket with a number, and gave them a chance to enter the lottery with their dreams, directly from their mobile device.
Background
While lottery sales have been on the decline globally over the last few years, things were especially bleak in Lebanon.
The number of young people playing the Lotto had dropped for the third year running, and Loto Libanais sales were down drastically.
We were briefed to uplift lottery ticket sales with the added objective of building brand love.
Describe the creative idea (30% of vote)
We discovered that people were bored of playing the lottery, mainly because the way it is played has been the same forever. So we changed the game by challenging the age-old practice of picking a lottery ticket with a number, and gave people a chance to enter the lottery with their dreams.
Introducing Dream Number - an online application where users could enter their dreams, to generate their very own unique lottery numbers as derived from that unique dream itself.
By designing a bespoke typeface in English and Arabic, with multiple number combinations embedded within each character, the application allowed users to create billions of number combinations, allowing them to enter the lottery instantly.
Describe the strategy (20% of vote)
The number of young Lebanese people playing the Lotto had dropped drastically.
With the current economic crisis, the Lebanese people were starting to get pessimistic about the future. They were losing hope and saw little opportunity to achieve their goals and ambitions.
Our strategy was to combine this national sentiment with the discovery that people were simply bored of playing the lottery because of selecting the same numbers again and again. Our approach was to invite people to play with their dreams instead, urging them to be positive and dream at a time when it was needed most.
Describe the execution (20% of vote)
We created bespoke typefaces in both Arabic and English that would seamlessly convert in structure from words to numbers. These were made available to people on the Dream Number online application which allowed users to enter their dreams and generate unique lottery numbers instantly.
The real dreams entered by users were then turned into our print campaign, which featured hidden numbers within the dreams. These user-generated ads captured the mood of the Lebanese people and gave them more reason to turn their dreams into a reality.
Our message was also communicated with the help of digital billboards, that effectively showcased how real dreams were turned into lottery numbers.
We also created social content and got the always-online youth of Lebanon excited about our new way to play.
List the results (30% of vote)
The campaign was a major hit for the brand, generating an uplift in sales and brand love.
Within the first week, Loto Libanais received more than 100,000 entries. More than half of these converted to ticket sales.
The campaign resulted in an incredible 70% spike in Loto Libanais website traffic, which saw dreams of all sorts being shared. Sales figures increased by 32%.
And of course: we had made playing the lottery fun again for everybody.