Rekindling viewers passion to play the lottery
Lotto asks Gogglebox: What would you do?
The Big Idea
After 21 years, Camelot were revamping the main Lotto game and supported the relaunch with a successful new advertising campaign, “Please Not Them”. The adverts were successfully driving brand reappraisal, but what Lotto also wanted to do was reconnect with “real people” on an emotional level and remind them why they played the Lottery.
We wanted to plug into the “what would you do?” conversation and remind people that just taking part in Lotto gives you the chance to dream about winning. We embarked on a project to produce a very special mini-episode of a TV show, to be broadcast in commercial airtime. Gogglebox, one of our biggest shows reaching 4 million viewers every Friday, reflects real Britain and was the perfect show to use as the basis for our mini-episode. We wanted to fuel dreams and spark conversations in living rooms across the land by sharing the Goggleboxers own hopes and dreams if they won Lotto and allowing viewers to relate to them. The mini episode we produced, complete with credits, intro music and Caroline Aherne as narrator, saw our Gogglebox favourites watch the latest “Please Not Them” advert with Noel Edmonds. In the style of the main show, they reviewed the advert and then went on to discuss their dreams about what they’d do if they won big. The 2-minute mini-episode aired across a full ad break within the main Gogglebox programme on Friday night, reaching fans of the show at their most engaged moment.
Making it Happen
Gogglebox contributors are neither presenters nor actors, so getting it to look natural and fun was vital. Our aim was to remain completely faithful to the much loved and award winning format, and in order to do this we agreed that Studio Lambert would film the mini episode authentically, with no client or creative agency present. This meant a huge leap of faith for The National Lottery and the pre-production meetings were vital. We had a working party of the client, AMV BBDO, Studio Lambert, Vizeum, The Story Lab and C4 where we discussed the best way to bring the idea to life in a natural way whilst delivering the key messages.
We teased the campaign in the previous week’s Gogglebox, with three different spots, and also created a 30” promo which was placed last in break before the show, telling viewers to stay tuned in the next ad break for a treat. On the night it premiered, C4, Lotto and the Gogglebox engaged in some twitter banter. Gogglebox is consistently one of the top 3 most viewed programmes on All4, so using our innovative iVoD format Ad Elect, we enabled our 13M registered users to select the family they wanted to view.
The Results
The campaign reached 15 million adults and had 17,000 views on Lotto’s YouTube channel. The commercial mini-episode retained 95% of the viewers watching Gogglebox versus a total broadcast peak time norm retention of 43% and 46% of those who recalled the advert say they have played the Lotto as a result of seeing the activity, versus a norm of 15% for bespoke adverts.
Recall of the mini episode was 34% better than the norm for innovative ad breaks created by C4.
