Champions of Cash is a 3D sports-themed game the New York Lottery needed people to notice and learn how to play. Undertone got the campaign, and I built the two rich-media units that ran it, one with coins scattered across a basketball court and a mobile-only unit panning a 360-degree view of four sports arenas. It was an OMMA 2017 finalist.
The hard constraint was compliance. Responsible-gaming copy had to stay legible in every state of the unit, on desktop and on mobile, including while the venue swapped behind the panels and while the in-unit video played over the ticket.
How we built it
I built the timed venue rotation, the split-panel layout, and the in-unit video player, so tapping play never bounced anyone out of 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, which meant those moving parts had to hold the constraints rather than renegotiate them.
Reviews ran on working browser builds rather than comps.
When mobile forced the panels to stack, the ticket stayed tappable and the disclaimer stayed clear at every breakpoint before anything reached the client, which is a round of client revisions we never had to spend.
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 rather than sending them out of it. 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 actually 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 campaign recap, the three units together hit the New York Lottery's KPIs, and each one carried a different part of that. The takeover and the mobile 360 drove the awareness and engagement. The in-unit video held attention without spending a click. The tagged exits and the Canvas retarget carried the path to an actual ticket, which is the part the client could measure. The campaign grid card for the desktop unit lives at /projects/client-ny-lottery.
What transferred
Tag the exits while you are still building. Retrofitting tracking onto a shipped unit costs more than adding it in the first pass, and the numbers are only worth collecting if someone can act on them.
Reviewing on clickable builds is the other habit that carried. A stacked mobile layout, a disclaimer that cannot move, a video that has to play inside the frame. None of that surfaces in a static comp.