Sounds of Lunar New Year
In celebration of Lunar New Year, OLG in collaboration with Balmoral Multicultural Marketing launched an innovative cultural campaign providing their players with “A new way to wish Lunar New Year”. The campaign, titled “Sounds of Lunar New Year,” integrates OLG’s brand with Ontario’s vibrant cultural landscape.
Jeffery Almeida (SVP – Balmoral) stated, “Wishing good fortune is intrinsic to Lunar New Year. The approach leveraged this cultural truth and juxtaposed OLG’s lottery products, which are closely associated with the belief in luck and fortune.”
Campaign ads showed family and friends celebrating Lunar New Year in a unique and creative way by singing the OLG lottery ‘Win Tone’.
This well-recognized audio mnemonic served as the connective thread across the various situations, by wishing good fortune and culminating in the gifting of an OLG Lottery Bouquet.
“We believed this strong cultural execution would break through a very cluttered Lunar New Year period, and the results confirmed it did,” added Almeida. “The creative showed an impressive performance across all digital platforms, including Connected TV, Programmatic, and Social.” The campaign has 19.42 + million impressions!
In addition, OLG and Balmoral sought to engage their audience in-person by amplifying the creative idea with an interactive pop up, held at The First Markham Place Mall. Since gifting lottery tickets for Lunar New Year is common within the community, a kiosk was set up that prepared lottery tickets into lottery bouquets for gifting. Players who purchased up to $25 worth of any OLG lottery products would receive a DIY lottery bouquet where the tickets could be easily clipped in, making for an interesting, well-packaged gift!
The activation was a success, with an overwhelming response producing more than 250 bouquets and 10, 000 impressions. Day 1 lottery product purchases over $25 saw a sales lift for one retailer of over 100% of their typical sales and over 70% for the second retailer.
The campaign also engaged two Chinese social media influencers to take this to a broader, relevant audience. These influencers showcased their own customized DIY lottery bouquets in video content, and one visited the mall to capture the buzz around the event.
With 205K+ impressions and 40K+ engagements, the influencer campaign added an extra dimension to the activation. Overall, the campaign was impactful with an impressive ‘Relevance’ score of 80%, coupled with higher-than-average favourability and consideration scores.
This innovative approach not only honoured tradition but also breathed new life into the celebration, leaving a lasting impression on the community and setting a high standard for future campaigns.
Maxine Chapman (VP Brand and Marketing Office) said, “The campaign was an opportunity for OLG to further our Lunar New Year campaign narrative, by working closely with the community and building on the festival excitement. We wanted to show the integration of the campaign by actively participating in the festivities with Asian communities.”
In addition, to complement this campaign, OLG and Balmoral also developed assets to create awareness and engagement with the Asian community about responsible gambling. Leveraging OLG’s award-winning responsible gambling program, PlaySmart, these in-language digital ads used culturally relevant humour to drive a strong brand presence while educating players on the odds of winning their favourite games. The goal was to increase gambling literacy while driving engagement and traffic to PlaySmart’s Chinese-language webpages.
This campaign won the Bronze Award at the 2023 Summit International Creative Awards, highlighting the exceptional partnership OLG has built with Balmoral Agency and the outstanding results achieved to connect with multicultural audiences in an authentic way.
