How the Kentucky Lottery’s Halloween games oozed enthusiasm this past fall.
By Edie Frakes, Vice President and Chief Brand Officer, Kentucky Lottery
Published February 18, 2025
Licensed property and seasonal games are some of the very best ways to attract new and lapsed lottery players. That’s why the team at the Kentucky Lottery was thrilled to offer Sony’s Ghostbusters property as part of our overall lineup of fall games. We offered the brand in scratch-off, Fast Play and eInstant formats.
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The Big Idea:
Slime our historic headquarters at 1011 West Main Street, Louisville, Kentucky. It was a collaborative effort from our marketing team. We had seen life-sized activations for other successful brands and we thought this seemed like a great thing to try. We worked hard to gain buy-in from the operations and executive teams, and of course got the blessing from IGT/Sony licensor.
Challenges:
We couldn’t deface or compromise our building headquarters, which is on the historic register.
We weren’t sure if the licensor or the city of Louisville would approve such a big idea.
The Solution:
We partnered with BCH Agency, one of our creative stakeholders, to produce the appearance of a slimed aesthetic using a series of static clings and banners to give the appearance of a slimed building. We were very precise in this creative to ensure a movie-like quality to it by having the banners mimic the look of the natural brick façade of the building.
We were also precise in how we rolled this out by creating intrigue and buy-in from our players and neighbors before the official all-building sliming. We teased the sliming on our social media channels. We took this to the next level when our partner in this promotion and neighbor – the legendary Caufield’s Novelty, a 100-year-old staple in our community for costumes and party supplies – got in on the fun. They amplified our sliming through their social media channels as another touchpoint to build the excitement of this truly one-of-a-kind promotion. By game launch day the building was fully slimed, turning heads all over downtown Louisville, by showing just what was strange in our neighborhood of West Louisville.
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The Results:
We supported the Ghostbusters games with a TV campaign featuring the current movie-based Slimer doing what he does best, stealing the show with his enormous appetite for food and hijinks. The ad recall and likeability scores for this ad cleared our benchmarks with 53% recall and 72% likeability. The ads ranked second among all Kentucky Lottery ads produced, behind only our holiday spot.
Our promotional sliming of the building also offered all our lottery winners and Kentucky Lottery visitors an out-of-this-world experience when coming to our office to claim their winnings. This was part of the plan for our creative – to have another touchpoint with players on the fun and exciting games we offer at the Kentucky Lottery.
We really focused on driving player engagement. Lots of players took selfies or photos when our building was slimed, and Lottery President and CEO Mary Harville was even asked to be in a photo with a winner against the slime! It also created a fun atmosphere for visitors using the Lottery for their meetings. The slimed building also brought a lot of excitement to our neighborhood by garnering a lot of attention with the business community, their customers, pedestrians and Louisville visitors. Players could even tag themselves using the QR code on the tombstones included as part of the promotion.
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The media publicity associated with sliming the building garnered nearly half a million free media impressions with an earned media value of nearly $50,000. This value more than paid for the cost of the marketing activation.
All local TV stations picked up our promotion, and the promotion even made national headlines with the Ghostbusters’ fan base:
Our Big Idea paid off handsomely! Not only did we receive excellent media coverage, we also succeeded with our goal of increased player engagement. And had a lot of fun! It was a win-win-win all around!
