Lottery Ads Speak Not of Gambling: ‘This Will Be Fun!’

Officials of the California lottery, which will be one of the largest gambling operations in the world when it begins Oct. 3, plan to spend $22 million over the next year trying to persuade its customers that they are not gambling.

Instead, the emphasis will be on “fun.”

In an ambitious advertising campaign now being formulated, the lottery may use everything from the air waves to newspapers to billboards to shopping cart placards, bus stops signs, direct mail and even skywriting to target each man and woman in California 18 years old and older.

Boon for Education

The pitch will be that for $1 “you can enjoy a form of entertainment and at the same time benefit the state with funds for education,” said Brad Fornaciari, who is directing the lottery’s multimillion-dollar media campaign from Sacramento.

“What we’re saying is that when you buy a ticket, you’re getting a chance to play a fun game, you’re having a good time and, hey, you might even win and that’ll even be more fun,” said Fornaciari, a 30-year-old executive with Needham Harper Worldwide, a Los Angeles-based agency that recently landed the lucrative contract to market the lottery during its first year.

“Gambling,” he said, “is not the issue.”

Only incidentally, in the advertisements, will players be told of the lottery’s odds, which are 10 to 1 against winning $2 in the first series of games and 25 million to 1 against being one of the $2 million jackpot winners.

Actually, the mandate to camouflage the gambling aspects of the games comes from administrators of the lottery. “The lottery and its games shall be portrayed by an image of fun and entertainment while maintaining the dignity of the state,” read a list of rules for agencies bidding on the advertising contract. “The successful vendor shall not portray the lottery as a gambling activity or as having any connection with gambling.”

Never Say That Word

Chon Gutierrez, chief deputy director, said the staff is simply trying to be “consistent.”

“The initiative (creating the games) categorizes the lottery as entertainment and fun . . . and never uses the word ‘gambling,’ ” Gutierrez said. “As a matter of policy, we’re trying to develop a procedure consistent with the initiative the people voted in.”

Fornaciari says he has no problem avoiding gambling in his advertising pitches because “lotteries aren’t gambling, simple as that.”

“I think people put their dollars down to have a good time,” said the new advertising chief, who held a similar job with the Colorado state lottery during its start-up days in 1983. “If you’re not having fun, you won’t keep playing. . . . That’s not gambling.

“Consumers don’t consider lotteries gambling,” he added. “Consumer studies in Colorado, Pennsylvania and New Jersey all agree--when you ask people whether it’s a game or gambling, the majority say it’s not gambling. . . . If consumers don’t consider it gambling, then there’s no reason for anyone else to.”

Of the estimated $1 billion the lottery hopes to bring in during its initial year, 50% will go to prizes, no more than 16% to administration and promotion and at least 34% will go to California schools.

Everyone a Winner?

“We’ll be stressing the idea that ‘everybody wins’--you win because you have a good time playing and the schools win because they get money,” Fornaciari said.

The first lottery brochure, now being distributed around the state, has this slogan in bold green letters on the cover: “A good feeling for a lot of good reasons. The California State Lottery.”

Inside, the pamphlet says: “The lottery was created to develop an important supplemental source of revenue for education in the state. Once a full range of games is in operation, the lottery will provide an estimated $500 million annually for public education. So the lottery is more than just fun and a chance to win money. When you play the California lottery our schools win, too.”

That, in essence, is the message Fornaciari says he wants to get across.

In the beginning, the ads will have “a very broad reach,” designed to entice every adult in California to try the lottery. Then, as player patterns are analyzed and lottery officials find out who isn’t playing, there will be special targeting campaigns to try to lure in the slackers.

Fornaciari says his company also is researching census data and other information in order to be able to mine California’s numerous ethnic communities for lottery players. California’s large ethnic communities--Latino, black, Asian and others--are like “states within a state,” Fornaciari said.

A Unique Animal

“Everyone agrees, California is a unique animal,” he said. “There is the geographic segmentation--the person in the San Joaquin Valley is not the same person who lives in San Francisco, and they both differ from Los Angeles. . . . . Who knows, the people in Southern California may play for different reasons than they do in Northern California.”

Television spots--due to start a week before the games--will be a primary tool for Fornaciari, along with newspaper ads and radio commercials. The lottery also may prepare special messages for black and Latino radio stations, which air in many of the state’s poorer neighborhoods. In other states, lotteries flourish in low-income areas.

“We’ll use any effective medium that’s marketable and there’s a good possibility many, many ethnic media will be used,” Fornaciari said.

One thing the advertisements will steer clear of, Fornaciari said, is celebrities. “We tried that in Colorado and it didn’t work. (Impressionist Rich Little pitched that state’s lottery with mediocre results.) People would rather see other people like themselves (in the ads) having a good time.”

Smoothly for a While

One advertising executive whose company lost out in the final bidding for the $22-million media contract predicts that things will go smoothly for Fornaciari and the rest of the Needham Harper Worldwide executives during the initial start-up of the lottery. Then they will have to deal with the losers.

“In the beginning, you don’t have anything to worry about. Everybody wants to try the lottery,” said the executive, who asked not to be named. “But then, real disappointment sets in because you have a lot of people who’ve played and haven’t won a thing. It’s like selling a product when most people are unhappy with it; you have to convince unhappy buyers to come back again.”

The ad executive said new games will have to be introduced and larger prizes awarded.

But Fornaciari is not worried: “It’s a lot like any new product--sales stabilize. There are going to be people out there that the lottery just doesn’t do anything for.”