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Lottery Follows the Herd : Games: Who dreams up the ideas like Moo-la Mania? Spot the Cow is a hybrid--partly an original, partly borrowed.

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

The California Lottery is hoping to milk a cash cow named Spot for about $58 million.

Spot is the comely Holstein on the lottery’s new scratcher ticket, Moo-La Mania. For $1 a pop, bettors rub off miniature milk bottles to spell out C-O-W and win from $2 to $10,000.

But she is no common pasture variety cow. Spot’s a very California cow, peering through mirror sunglasses and munching dollar bills.

“We wanted to capitalize on the trendiness of cows,” explains lottery spokeswoman Cynthia Moore. “You know, they’re sort of hip and happening now.”

A California raisin is one thing, but a California cow? Just who dreams up the ideas for those little silvery lottery tickets? Not some sadist who dropped his fortune at Trump’s Taj Mahal. Some are the inspirations of lottery staffers; some are the creations of advertising agencies; some come from the three major contractors who print the tickets for state lotteries.

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“Everybody always pictures this dark room with wild people in it,” says James Culver, a vice president of Atlanta-based Scientific Games, whose clients include the California lottery. “That’s not quite the way it happens.”

Frequently, he says, a state lottery will come to his company and say, “OK, Scientific Games, you come up with some ideas. We’ll refine them.”

It’s not just a matter of deciding, for example, to do a cow. “The design of the game is simply one component,” Culver says. “You also have the theme, the prize structure, the play style. . . . “

Five years ago, when the California lottery was in its infancy, Culver recalls, Scientific Games called most of the shots. But as the lottery “matured,” California, like most states, started having its own ideas.

Spot the Cow was, like the fabled camel, designed by committee.

Spot went on sale Saturday; the planning for Spot started 17 weeks earlier.

“It’s a very long process,” says Cynthia Moore. “We do a lot of test marketing.” Moo-La Mania is the first spell-out scratcher for California.

Spot the cow is a hybrid--partly an original, partly borrowed from another state’s lottery cow.

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Marilyn Holland, graphics manager for Scientific Games at its Gilroy, Calif., facility (where Spot was printed) explains that the idea of doing a cow originated in Sacramento with a committee of the state lottery, went to Landor Associates, a San Francisco design firm, and was then refined by her staff.

“We wanted more the California look,” Holland explains, “instead of the Midwest cow look.” In a big room, working at their Macintoshes and laser color printers, Holland and her illustrators ultimately came up with a whimsical black and white cow wearing cool glasses.

In small states, things remain rather less complicated. “Four or five of us just sit around a table and chew the fat,” says New Hampshire lottery spokeswoman Maura McCann. If an idea sounds good, they ask their contractor, Dittler Bros. of Atlanta, “to make it all pretty and send it to us.”

Cow mania is not exclusively a Pacific Coast phenomenon.

Indeed, “Cash Cows” was the Iowa lottery’s most successful game in 1990. John Schreurs, vice president of Schreurs and Associates in Des Moines, the advertising agency that created the game, describes the Iowa cow: “A very friendly type of Holstein. That takes away the gambling edge. It’s almost like you could see this as your pet. The cow does have $50 bills in her mouth.”

The cow does not wear sunglasses. Says California’s Moore, “Sometimes what works in Iowa won’t work here.”

Iowa is farm country and this isn’t the first time a bovine has graced a lottery ticket. Lottery spokesman Bret Voorhees recalls one cold winter when gamblers were lured with scratch-off tickets promising a vacation in Hawaii. The name of that game? “Hula Moola.”

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Thirty-two states now have lotteries and ideas “get traded around” from state to state, explains Bill Knowlton of the New York state lottery, which started in 1967, three years after trailblazing New Hampshire. “It’s like, ‘California had great success with this. Let’s give it a try.’ ”

Currently, New Yorkers can choose among “King Cash,” a tie-in to John Goodman’s new film, “King Ralph”; “Treasure Quest” (send in your losing tickets for merchandise drawings); “Fat Cat” (scratch the cat’s tummy and win money) and “Hoops,” a basketball game.

Out in Iowa, “Hog Wild,” a scratcher with a comical pig, was a hot item, introduced just before the annual state fair. A surprise hit was “Frosty the Doughman,” a happy snowman offering 40,000 prizes of $50 each.

For Iowans, there’s a new basketball game, “On the Money;” “Rocky V,” a movie tie-in, and a casino cash game. Coming soon: “Lucky Duck,” featuring a sort of Disneyesque quacker.

In New Hampshire and in Iowa, unlike in California, the scratch-offs remain the top seller. “We know what our players like,” says spokeswoman McCann. “They like card games. They like add-’em-up games.”

They also liked “Read My Lips,” a little spoof of the George Bush one-liner. “It had big red lips,” McCann says. “It sold great. It got a good chuckle.”

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On the other hand, she adds, a ticket offering a Cadillac as a bonus prize was a notable flop. Although the car was donated, she explains, “People perceived the (cash) prizes to be less because they thought we had to pay for the Cadillac.”

Currently, New Hampshirites can put their dollars on “Hot Ticket,” a match-and-win ticket that McCann describes as “kind of fiery red color with flames across it”; blackjack, “Impress Me,” which has an ocean-liner theme, and “Daily Dough,” a jolly baker cooking up dollar bills.

By design, New Hampshire has never done a cow. It’s a rural state, McCann explains, and as it is “we’re frequently referred to as Cow Hampshire.”

One game that sort of sank was “Iowa 86,” which offered a top prize of $86,000. Voorhees says, “Our research showed that people felt they couldn’t win that; it was too high.”

Californians showed a disappointingly limited amount of enthusiasm for “Play Ball,” a baseball-themed scratcher introduced in baseball season. “It was a little confusing. You had to add up numbers and get scores,” says Moore.

Culver says people are always offering ideas for games they think would be wonderful, but they just don’t translate onto a 1 1/2 inch by 3 1/2 inch foil-faced ticket. Others simply have no player appeal. One noteworthy bomb was a game in which a player scratched off “yes” or “no,” win or lose. “People like to rub off and see money,” he says, “but they also like some play value. They don’t say, ‘I’m going to bet on the lottery.’ They say, ‘I’m going to play the lottery.’ ”

A contractor’s challenge, Culver says, may be to convert a design “from a graphic of billboard size down to a small ticket.” Working in a security-conscious environment, printers use a computerized ink jet spray to spray on the play spots.

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Commonly, states introduce a new scratcher game every six to eight weeks. Unlike California, some states have more than one game going at a time. California destroys unsold tickets. In Iowa, Voorhees says, “We just leave an old game out there until it sells out.”

In California, scratchers are expected to account for $500 million of a projected $2 billion in sales this year, compared with Lotto, the big draw, with $1.5 billion. Lotto creates instant millionaires and, with the other three games, raises money for the schools. To date, it’s a little more than $4 billion.

The California Lottery Act dictates that the lottery steer clear of what Moore calls the “gamey themes,” the ones with hard-core gambling motifs, in favor of general themes. Like cows.

Moo-La Mania will be in circulation for seven weeks. If it grosses $56 million to $58 million, “We’ll all have smiles,” Moore says.

To help things along, the California Lottery and country music station KLAC-AM are sponsoring a “moo-off” at 1 p.m. Saturday at the L.A. Health and Fitness Expo at the Hyatt-LAX.

Moo-ers will be required to sign up on-site. “You can’t moo by proxy,” Moore says.

They will be judged by a pair of deejays from the station. Scoring will be based on clarity, authenticity of sound and, yes, udderance. The champion moo-er will take home a VCR.

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Holy cow.

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