Brand Index: Time is money for the National Lottery’s ad campaign
TWO months ago we saw the start of the biggest marketing campaign for the National Lottery since its launch in 1994, coinciding with arguably the biggest change to the game – a doubling of the ticket price.
But how has this change affected the Lottery, and what has been the impact of the campaign itself?
On BrandIndex we track both National Lottery and Lotto but research shows that National Lottery is still the name most used by the public, so that is the one I’ve focused on. A glance at the index line (a composite of six perception measures) shows that views of the brand have worsened significantly since the start of October, although they are now beginning to recover.
Not surprising perhaps given the price doubling, but has the campaign managed to reduce the impact? To assess that I’ve focused in on consideration and looked at people who were exposed to the TV campaign. At the overall level those considering purchasing a National Lottery ticket dropped marginally, from 33 per cent in September to 30 per cent by mid-November.
However, when we look at that for those exposed to the campaign, it is 35 per cent. Break that down further by the type of ad they saw and we can start to understand that the better the exposure, the greater the impact.
Of those that saw a 60 second ad, 42 per cent would consider playing, falling to 36 per cent for 40 seconds and 33 per cent for 20 seconds. The second chart delves deeper and looks at the six specific executions showing that a couple of adverts were very successful (including the generic ad), a couple had moderate success and some had very little effect.
So the National Lottery was able to offset an unpopular move with a good campaign. But it could have been even more successful if it gave more air time to the hardest working ads.
Stephan Shakespeare is the chief executive of YouGov