Sleek. Sexy. Luxurious. The Texas Lottery.
Really?
Earlier this year, the state’s biggest (legal) game of chance launched a new instant lottery ticket in an effort to boost revenue from a source of state income that has become less and less relevant. The new strategy: Plug the lottery — a product that historically has been purchased disproportionately by low-income players — as a luxury item.
How the new campaign evolved illustrates the conflicting messages legislators have given the Texas Lottery Commission: Earn as much money as possible for public education — the lottery generates about $1 billion a year for schools — without unduly influencing people to become gamblers.
It also demonstrates the sheer power of marketing. The challenge of producing and promoting a new lottery game is that it really can’t be all that different from old games. Lottery rules are described by strict state laws.
Moreover, a “luxury lottery” can’t be too luxurious. When the agency introduced a $50 scratch-off ticket in late 2007, at the time the highest-priced ticket in the country, it was condemned by critics as an expensive enticement for lower-income players hooked on their lottery habits. So the new, fancy lottery ticket would have to sell at the same price as the other, unfancy tickets.
The goal, in other words, was to come up with a way to convince a potential new players — a more affluent segment that is traditionally less interested in the lottery — to buy a product that essentially hasn’t changed in 20 years.
Enter the new instant scratch-off “Black Ticket.” Unlike the designs of other lottery tickets, which tend to be colorful and busy-looking, this one was simple and monochromatic.
“We wanted to have something that was visually unique,” Michael Anger, lottery operations director, explained at last month’s lottery commission meeting. “You’ll note on the ticket that we have black-on-black ink designs and patterning on the ticket, with gold leaf lettering.
“And we wanted to create a product that would position itself differently from our typical scratch-off games. It has, you know, kind of a high end quality associated with it. And we also wanted to build an advertising campaign wrapped around this product that would communicate that same type of high end, high quality feel associated with this product.”
The new campaign was produced by the lottery commission’s long-time Dallas advertising firm, TracyLocke. It describes the project on its website: “We created a new specialty product with a sleek, sexy look and a new name: the ‘Black Ticket’. The ticket’s sophisticated appearance as a luxury item combined with the playfulness of lady luck and the lottery bore the tag line: ‘Luck-Xury’.
“Our take? Let’s make this a proposition with cross-over appeal: an inexpensive consumer choice with a luxury item purchase appealing to all income brackets.”
Next up: Where to place the Black Ticket ads to get them in front of affluent eyes? The decision: the March Texas Monthly and, later, some The Wall Street Journal editions’ Money & Investing sections.
What about exclusivity — the sense that the new ticket is harder to find than other tickets? The new ad promotes the tickets as “Available at select lottery retailers.”
“What was the thinking around selecting the locations where it’s going to be available?” Lottery Commissioner J. Winston Krause asked at the commission meeting. “I mean, it’s not available everywhere, right?”
Not exactly. “It is available at all of our retail locations,” Anger clarified. “So the play in our advertisement with regard to the exclusivity is, is that only lottery retailers have this product line.”
The concept — a product positioned as high-priced and exclusive but which is actually neither — has worked. The black ticket has been generating $5 million a week in sales, making it the lottery’s best-selling $10 ticket launch ever.
