Champions of Cash is a 3D sports-themed game the New York Lottery needed people to notice and learn how to play. Undertone ran the campaign with two rich-media units, one with coins scattered across a basketball court and a mobile-only unit panning a 360-degree view of four sports arenas. I built the desktop unit in the demo video and sliced the rest into components, and Jonathan McGough built out the mobile version. It was an OMMA 2017 finalist.
The hard constraint was compliance. Responsible-gaming copy had to stay legible in every state of the unit, including while the in-unit video played over the ticket.
How we built it
I built the desktop unit end to end. A basketball drops onto the court and bounces like a real ball, losing velocity with each bounce, then hits a pile of coins and splashes them off in the direction it landed. The bounce runs on GSAP physics, and every layer is a transparent PNG sized to the full screen. After the splash the end frame fades in, and clicking the feature image plays the video of the mobile app the Lottery was launching without leaving the ad. Design had locked the venue language and the scratch-off ticket treatment, and compliance review sat with the producer and the client's legal team, so the layout and the video both had to keep that design and that copy intact.
Reviews ran on working browser builds, so the ticket stayed tappable and the disclaimer stayed clear before anything reached the client.
Learn More, App Store, and Google Play each got their own click tracker, and the video counted as a fourth engagement that kept people inside the unit. Tagging the exits while the unit was still being built is what let the campaign team read which path converted. The Facebook Canvas retarget then picked up the same audience on a different surface, same brand language, this time walking through how to buy a ticket. Cross-platform here meant the desktop takeover, the mobile 360, and the retarget had to read as one campaign while living in three separate builds with no shared codebase between them.
Per the MediaPost OMMA entry, the two ad units drove awareness and engagement, the Canvas retarget covered how to buy a ticket, and the three together met the New York Lottery's KPIs. The campaign grid card for the desktop unit lives at /projects/advertising/ny-lottery.
What later builds kept
Later builds kept two habits from this one: tagging the exits during the build, and reviewing on clickable builds, where a disclaimer that cannot move and a video that has to play inside the frame both show up before a client sees them.
Credits
I wanted to make sure everyone on the team was cited here, because none of this would have been possible without these people.
| Name | Company | Role |
|---|---|---|
| Josh Gotthelf | Undertone | VP, Brand Marketing |
| Jeff Ortegon | Undertone | Creative Director |
| Allison Volpicelli | Undertone | Senior Creative Designer |
| Jonathan McGough | Undertone | Senior Creative Developer |
| Jeff Liu | Undertone | Creative Developer |
| Jaime Nash | Undertone | Associate Director, Creative Strategy |
| Justin Samuels | Undertone | Senior Manager, Brand Marketing |
| Mariam Matin | Undertone | Brand Marketing Associate |
| Ilana Greenberg | Undertone | Brand Marketing Content Coordinator |
| Sara Itak | Undertone | Campaign Manager |
| Jeff Allen | Undertone | Creative Project Manager |
| Jessica Szewczuk | Undertone | Senior Account Executive |
| Christina Fiasconaro | Undertone | Client Services Manager |
| Jayne Coleman | Undertone | Client Strategist |
| Maria Caruso | Undertone | Sales Director |
| Denis Mahon | Universal McCann | Account Executive |
| Denise Rackoff | Universal McCann | Senior Associate, Portfolio Management |
| Kaitlin Baldauf | Universal McCann | Senior Manager, Integrated Investment |
The names, companies, and roles above are the campaign credits from the MediaPost OMMA 2017 finalists page, which lists Universal McCann as the affiliated agency.