The classic lottery ad is all about winning. All about the thrill of you winning. It’s all about you, the audience. All very expected. And deep down makes you wonder if that winner is going to be someone else – again. So Rothco has changed the conversation. And the tone. The campaign, The Celebrations, is not about the exuberance of you winning.

It’s about what all that winning is doing behind the scenes at Irish National Lottery HQ. Now that the new Lotto Plus game with a lot more winners the in-house band called The Celebrations, that has to create their buzz, is exhausted. In the mockumentary, the band reveals their chagrin that the siren, which alerts them to another winner, never stops sounding.

Stephen Rogers, creative director at Rothco, commented, “We discovered that people’s belief in winning the much-loved Lotto game had diminished over time, partly because most of the large jackpot winners choose to not go public. This meant we just couldn’t talk about them, so we had to reinstall that belief and make people fall in love with Lotto again. Thankfully, we had some new news to talk about, as the Lotto game was changing. The game was going to create even more winners and more millionaires than ever before. We knew this had to be our focus and we wanted to create a campaign that felt unexpected and avoided all the typical Lottery tropes of fast cars and speed boats. We decided to open the doors of the Lotto Headquarters to the public and show the fallout of all these new winners and millionaires coming through the doors on the people that worked there – in particular, the Lotto house band, The Celebrations.”

Michael Hayes, head of marketing at the National Lottery, commented, “We are really excited about our new Lotto brand campaign and how it focuses on the joys of winning the Lotto. It is executed in a modern, fun creative way which we believe will make our audiences and players smile. Our aim is to get the Lotto brand talked about again. The campaign has a big idea at its heart and this has enabled us to develop supporting content that can be used across multiple traditional and digital media platforms to excite both our existing and next generation Lotto players.”

The campaign kicked off with a TVC, which will be supported with three 20-second films, radio, cinema, OOH, DOOH, press, digital, social, activation and POS.