Campaign breathes new life into New Jersey’s Pick-6
The New Jersey state lottery bet $1 million on a coupon incentive campaign and in return won more than $17 million in new business for its Pick-6 game.
Coupons distributed recently in freestanding newspaper inserts and direct mail triggered a whopping 154% increase in ticket sales for the game, says Linda Melone, the lottery’s deputy director of marketing and sales.
The promotion pulled Pick-6 out of a slump. The game’s sales had fallen after New Jersey began participating in a multistate lottery called the Big Game, which offers much larger jackpots.
In addition to the promotion, which offered players one free ticket for every two purchased, New Jersey changed the Pick-6 rules to provide a more lucrative prize.
“We were hearing from retailers and consumers that they wanted bigger jackpots,” Melone explains.
Direct mail coupons were delivered to 150,000 New Jerseyans, using the lottery’s database of past winners and another 50,000 gamblers whose names were rented from outside files. A total of 3.2 million newspaper FSIs were circulated on two consecutive Sundays to households in the state.
Nearly 19% of the coupons were redeemed. “Response was a lot higher than anything we expected,” Melone says. “I’d definitely do this again in the future.”
The campaign used television and radio ads, bus billboards and e-mail promotions encouraging people to look for the coupons in Sunday newspapers. The majority of the TV and radio spots aired near the weekend.
“I think what’s unique is that New Jersey used so many media,” says Jason Bacharach, vice president of marketing at Grafica Inc., the Chester, NJ agency that created the campaign. “And the message was twofold,” Bacharach adds. “We wanted to tell people there was a change in the game and offer them a coupon incentive to play it.”
Melone says it’s too soon to tell whether the campaign and changes in the game will be enough to sustain the higher sales necessary to generate bigger jackpots.
“We haven’t gone through enough jackpot cycles yet,” she says.
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