Lottery Improves Its Odds by Dipping Into Grab Bag of Marketing Ideas

Each Saturday, when a new batch of players takes a turn at the lottery’s “Big Spin,” Brad Fornaciari looks for some luck of his own.

For Fornaciari, an Arrow Shirt man look-alike who heads the California Lottery’s multimillion-dollar ad campaign, good luck lies in who wins big at the wheel. He is looking for the kind of winner who can help sell a lottery.

“If another illegal alien were to win the big prize, there’s going to be negative press on that,” Fornaciari lamented. “That has a negative effect on sales. . . . Hopefully, (the winner is) somebody marketable.

“If another young kid like Eric Dailey (a Big Spin winner of $6.3 million last February) who is glib and good-looking, young and wonderful (wins), you could see a little blip with the sales.”

Gauging the Mood

Maximizing those blips and minimizing those slumps keep Fornaciari and his team of promoters busy gauging the mood of Californians as the games settle into old hat.

“With most products, you pretty much know what is having an effect in a given time,” said Fornaciari, a vice president of Needham Harper Worldwide Inc., the agency that landed the $22-million advertising contract aimed at convincing Californians to try their luck at the lottery.

“For the lottery, there are so many things going on, even bad press. . . . This is a difficult industry from that perspective.”

In marketing most products, Fornaciari elaborated, there is a visible link between the ad campaign and sales. If beer drinkers, for instance, take a fancy to a certain label’s latest television ad, chances are they will try that brand.

In contrast, selling a lottery is dependent on scores of variables that go beyond television ads or even the unpredictability of the Big Spin. Sales can be affected by something as simple as how prominently a corner market displays its lottery posters or how much change a player is handed after buying a loaf of bread.

But, in being the 21st state to launch a lottery, California has been lucky in a sense.

Learning From Others

Promoters here took painstaking steps to avoid the miscues made by other states in marketing their games, and their approach has worked. With California borrowing freely from the grab bag of sales tricks compiled by the most successful of its predecessors, the lottery, with predicted sales of $2 billion in its first year, has become the richest in the world.

“There was no doubt the lottery would start off successful,” said Fornaciari, who was lured to California from the Colorado Lottery, where he worked at marketing the games. “The key was how long we could maintain that momentum.

“I knew the perception out there. The main message, if we did nothing, was that lottery equals money, lottery equals chances to win. If that was the only thing the lottery was known for, that would work. It would work short term, and the lottery would kick off beautifully.

“That wasn’t enough.”

Looking to other states, lottery officials also figured that play had to be fun. It had to make players feel good, besides.

Instead of featuring hordes of raucous adults jumping into tubs of money, the California Lottery took a pastoral, more subtle approach. Television ads portrayed homespun scenes and the messages were rendered in soft-spoken, trustworthy voices.

Each of the commercials, all of the brochures and posters and every speechmaker also made mention of what has become the statement most commonly associated with the lottery, “Our schools win, too.”

That, too, was according to plan.

Promoters were not about to let Californians forget that 34 cents of every $1 ticket is earmarked for education.

‘Goes to a Worthy Cause’

“People don’t feel that good about the money just going to some nebulous thing,” Lottery Director Mark Michalko said. “People know their money goes to a worthy cause in this state.

“In Ohio (where Michalko was the lottery’s legal counsel before coming to California), it went into the general fund in the beginning. The public wasn’t real interested in that. We later switched to the educational fund, and the public became more interested in playing the games.

“Even if they didn’t win . . . there still was the feeling that education was benefiting, and so I think people felt more comfortable playing.”

In Colorado, lottery sales took a precipitous drop when the novelty of the games wore off. In the winter of 1983, sales in that state of 3 million people slumped from more than $3 million a week to under $1.7 million.

“Up front you have terrific interest,” explained Bill Russell, the Colorado Lottery’s planning and research director. “Then interest seems to wane. It was a big drop.”

The lottery there eventually recovered, in large part, Fornaciari believes, because the state started pushing the idea that Colorado’s parks, its picturesque mountain areas and its playgrounds were the big winners.

A new kind of TV ad hit the tubes. A typical one featured a small-town recreation director telling how he would use his split of the money to buy a new swing set for the village park.

“In a town of 542, that meant a lot to the people,” Fornaciari said.

“We put 2 and 2 together. We added our tag line(“Everybody wins”), and once we started educating folks that there was something more to this lottery that just this chance . . . to take a shot at winning, they liked the lottery more. They felt better.”

Sales Triangle

Critical as it is, making players feel good about parting with their money is only part of the sales triangle. Clearly lottery sales also depend on players’ having fun with the games and making money on them. The prospect of finding a fortune beneath the latex covering on the tickets still is the biggest single lure.

“If we spent all our time talking about schools, we’re probably not going to sell a lot of lottery tickets because then you’re ignoring the other two-thirds of the equation,” Fornaciari said.

“We’re prioritized from a message standpoint that it’s fun, there are chances to win and the proceeds.” Moreover, he said, despite the delicate balance advertisers seek in creating their messages, making the games a success goes beyond sales pitches.

“You have a winner, take him on a tour of the state, get him on all those talk shows in all these towns in God knows where,” Fornaciari said. “You put that together with the game design, how they’re changing the games, and you add the Big Spin on top of that.

“It’s all important. All these things sort of work together.”