Camelot prepares ‘biggest-ever marketing campaign’

National Lottery operator Camelot is preparing its biggest marketing campaign since its launch in 1994 as its prepares to double the price of a Lotto ticket and fundamentally alter its gaming proposition.  

The through-the-line campaign carries the theme of ‘a new dawn’ with the first of two TV slots, a 20 second ‘teaser piece’, set to run from Thursday (26 September) ahead of the launch of the new-look Lotto game on 5 October. 

Click here to watch an exclusive Q&A with Camelot’s marketing director Sally Cowdry about the new campaign

The new Lotto set-up gives users more opportunities to win new prizes, including a new ‘raffle game’ with 1,000 winners per week, jackpot prizes of £10m. Chris Evans will host the Saturday Night prizedraw show for the first three months. 

Camelot’s claims the new set-up means that players will now have more ways to win more money, but crucially the campaign also comes at a time when it introduces its prise rise since its launch raising the price of a ticket from £1 to £2. Camelot plans to rationally articulate the comparative price hike is to help highlight how the funds are, in-part, re-invested into the country. 

Sally Cowdry, Camelot’s marketing director who joined from O2 earlier this year, says: “This is a crucially important moment for Camelot, effectively it’s a new brand strategy.” She adds: ”The campaign has a dual-purpose of showing how we are a life-changing company that both creates winners and invest in the culture and sports of the nation. It’s been a tricky brief and we’ve never tried to put the winning/investing messages together beforehand.”

Speaking specifically about the challenges of launching an entirely new brand messaging platform at the same time as doubling the price of the nation’s game, she says: “Players said the want the game to be refreshed and with more ways to win, with more money we’ve had to put the prices up… It’s not just a different price, it’s a different game.” 

Cowdry also says the need to effectively reboot the brand’s messaging, also prompted her to insist on a number of “media firsts” for the campaign, including the first cascade double-page spread (DPS) ad in the UK’s top-selling daily newspaper The Sun, plus a host of ads promoting the Saturday night draw in Sunday press. 

“We want to show how we’ll be making thousands of winners,” she says. We call this the ‘win/belief’ stage of the campaign.” 

Digital elements of the campaign will employ ‘gamified’ tactics with users encouraged to upload their own versions of the campaign’s theme song to Camelot’s YouTube channel.

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