Scratchcards, Storytelling and Strategy

Few marketers can transform consumers’ lives in an instant. But with The National Lottery delivering wins all day, every day across its portfolio of games, Steve Parkinson, Allwyn’s UK brand and marketing director, is also elevating the entertainment factor. The iconic ‘It Could Be You’ platform, meanwhile, grows in stature. 

Having spent 30 varied years working across PR, promotions, TV and radio in various guises, Parkinson has been the ideal person to bring an entertainment mindset to the gaming organisation. A masterstroke from the organisation's UK CEO Andria Vidler who practically cherrypicked him for the new role. 

“I’ve sort of zig zagged around and I have always been around storytelling,” is Parkinson’s assessment of his media and marketing career, which started with his first role, straight out of university, for Scottish Opera where he promoted a sell out tour of Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte across 10 venues. 

From there, he went on to run content for six months on cruise ships before returning to the UK to run marketing and content at festivals in Aberdeen and Newcastle, trying his hand briefly at PR and then TV presenting, before landing in radio, where things really took off. 

Subsequently, he has held dual roles as managing director and marketing director across major UK radio brands, including Heart, LBC, Galaxy, Magic, and Capital. At Chrysalis, where he spent almost a decade, he shaped identities for LBC, Heart and Galaxy, later redesigning the iconic butterfly logo itself. 

“Chris Wright, the founder of Chrysalis, called me up one day. He said, ‘Right, what you've done with Heart and LBC, I want you to redesign the Chrysalis butterfly’, which was a long-standing brand. He added, ‘But if you screw it up, I'll have you’. So, I really love that responsibility and slight risk that you have to take when you're going to change a brand that people have a lot of love for,” reveals Parkinson. 

He would go on to become marketing and brand director of Emap, and then, subsequent to his employer’s sale, Bauer’s head of strategic partnerships and events, which included acting as executive lead for its national charity, Cash for Kids.

Following several restructuring efforts within Bauer, Parkinson chose to leave, being sounded out for what was initially seen as a temp role at Allwyn by Vidler. Due to the short-term nature of the job, Parkinson declined, feeling that it needed a full-time marketer. A week later, Vidler called him back in agreement, creating his current role as a consequence. 

“She talked about bringing back the magic of the National Lottery. And I don't think that the magic had gone; it was that a similar magic was happening week in, week out, and we needed to have some more fun and be more engaging,” he explains. 

Bringing Back The Magic

The aim is to revitalise each of the games: Set For Life, Thunderball, Lotto Hotpicks, EuroMillions Hotpicks, Instant Win, and Scratchcards, the latter of which has recently been supported through a Christmas ad campaign by VCCP. All of the brands have also undergone a refresh as a starting point, with the eyes in the ‘Smiley’ hand logo made fuller to help them “smile more”.

Parkinson compares Allwyn to iconic chocolatier Cadbury, and Lotto to its flagship Dairy Milk brand. While EuroMillions may offer larger jackpots each week, Lotto has been developed with its own personality, which he credits previous operator Camelot for achieving with The National Lottery. Although he feels the other games in the stable lacked personality, an issue he has focused on remedying. 

‘Project North Star’ has been set up internally, focussed on breathing new life into Lotto which included a refresh. “We just need a bit more excitement. We need some more events. We need some new news for us to play a little bit more - it's all about getting more players to play a little bit more,” he explains. 

He adds that while marketers can naturally look to introduce the new thing and refuse to look back, he chose to go back to the original insight that brought the lottery’s original success, described as “a piece of gold dust”. It’s also a chance to introduce ‘It could be you’ to younger audiences who weren’t playing when it was originally in use.

Alongside the marketing function, Allwyn also has an internal creative hub which supports 44,000 retailers producing most content while exploring greater in‑house capabilities. The focus is on producing content and social media strategies, with Ashley Temple, LEGO’s global head of social creative, having joined, reinforcing a progressive, entertainment-led brand approach. 

Parkinson says that responsiveness is key for Allwyn’s marketing: whether reacting to competitor activity or consumer trends, its aim is to accelerate output without being held back by lengthy agency processes. And by building agility and handling more production directly, he believes that Allywn can deliver faster, more relevant social engagement. The hub will also enhance consumer experience and ensure the brand remains dynamic, reactive and commercially effective.

A scratch card is not just for Christmas

One of the National Lottery’s main revenue streams comes through its scratchcards, available at 44,000 retail points, which is growing in importance to the creative engagement strategy with enhancements being made to its playability, colours and new gaming formats. 

Over the years, they have also proven to be a popular gifting option, creating an enticing Christmas opportunity for Allwyn to release a campaign to drive sales. That led to the Tom Daley-fronted ‘Scratchcard-igans’ ad, featuring the Olympian and passionate knitter wearing garish festive cardigans complete with a ‘scratchable’ sequin surface. 

To take the multi-platform campaign further, a competition is running through The National Lottery’s Instagram to win one of the limited edition cardigans, with one in four revealing a £500 prize. 

An experiential tour across 50 Tesco stores has also launched, letting shoppers personalise scratch cards with their photos. Alongside playful ideas like the scratch cardigan, the Add Some Play to Christmas platform encourages tactile engagement, making the brand feel more interactive, festive, and alive through creative participation.

The original lottery mantra, ‘It Could Be You’ will also now play a bigger role after its recent return. The phrase will be rolled out across the portfolio of games as Parkinson looks to utilise that emotional trigger and grow the win belief in players. 

“This will create a more cohesive portfolio, not just through the design, but actually ‘It Could Be You’ works across all the games and products and ladder up into the National Lottery,” Parkinson outlines. “Sometimes the answer can be right under your nose. And if it’s there and consumers love it could make sense for you.”

There has also been a shift in the communications as Allwyn places more focus on the good causes that the National Lottery supports, having brought in TV presenter and national sweetheart Claudia Winkleman to use her charms while visiting benefactors across the country. 

“We used to say ‘thank you’, and ‘thanks to them’, and what we've changed now is to say ‘because of you, our players, look at the good causes that we've done,” Parkinson outlines. That begin with Chris Evans and the Virgin Breakfast Show where the broadcaster would speak with winners but the decision was made to feature a ‘chief storyteller’ who was not tied to one channel. 

Seven films have been made featuring Winkleman - each at around three-and-a-half minutes long, featuring her interaction with leaders of lottery benefactor organisations, with the aim of building trust with the nation through her natural authenticity. 

And to further that intention, the Lottery recently took over a whole advertising break during Channel 4’s Googlebox to create a special of the TV watching series. 

“Trust is so important to The National Lottery, particularly as we go through some of the technical changes and so on. And we're a new operator, so we want to really engender that trust and turn it up. To say this, you know, this is a great brand to have some fun.”

What do you love most about being a marketer? 

I love the variety. I get bored and distracted very easily, and whether it was running eight media brands at Bauer… Coming to Allwyn was, I remember, my first two or three interviews. I was just getting more and more excited about The National Lottery itself. 

If I talk to people at the BBC or British Airways, they all talk about the fact that they've got ‘British’ in the title, and we've got ‘national’ in the title… There's a great responsibility that comes with that. There’s a responsibility and privilege of guarding a brand, because, again, it's a license, so we're having to safeguard that brand and one of the matters to be protected is that we hand it on in a better condition for generations to come. So you're safeguarding somebody else's brand. 

You've got The National Lottery and the 670,000 good causes stories that you want to tell, and then the next minute, you're going, ’Right. How can we optimise EuroMillions to be even more successful?’ Because Euro Millions is on another high roll at the moment, and that's our quickest way of returning to good causes, because it's got the highest ROI.

What frustrates you as a marketer?

I like simplicity. We've had a lot of discussion around creative briefs and its very easy to have a great idea, but by the time it's gone around the houses with the agencies, the media owners, you look at the briefing and wonder ‘Where on earth has the fun gone?’ And that's nobody's individual blame. Simplicity lies at the far end of complexity. So, we went back to the briefs and just said, ‘Right, you can, you can’t write out a 20-page brief. You've got to boil it down so it still makes sense in two paragraphs.' The frustration is making sure that we keep remembering that and keep coming back to it. 

With Lotto, we want to get the nation talking about Lotto again. You can boil it down with all the insight and all the science. EuroMillions is more about that celebrity lifestyle - you win £100m, then you can change your world. And it was just simplifying and differentiating those brands. Sometimes you can just overthink it. I'm more of an instinctive creative storyteller, and I think that sometimes we just have to go back and ask if we are still doing what we originally intended.

What makes a great agency partner?

What’s great with VCCP and Hearts and Science is that they actually challenge us at every turn. So they're not a creative agency or an advertising agency that we just tell them what to do. They are strategic partners, and they support us on creative, planning and buying and so on.

Having that external perspective to make sure that you're being checked along the way - I can go off with all sorts of ideation and creativity, and it's about making sure that you also socialise everything. I really believe in a kind of democratic process to go, ‘Let's really work this through’ and I think what we've also learned in 18 months is there is more that we can do ourselves, because we've got some great brains on the inside. 

There's more that we could do ourselves as a partner, one example being with Chris Evans on Virgin. Obviously, we know our good causes and our winners and so on -  we don't need to go through an agency for that. So a lot of the storytelling we can do ourselves. We went to Claudia personally, with her agent, to say, 'We've got this idea. We think you're the most authentic storyteller, and we just want you to be you'. We can do more of that. We don't need to go through agencies for everything. I think sometimes you can hide behind an agency. Our creative hub will be bigger in the next year, and we can undertake more as we get more confident in what we're learning. 

What you're looking for is to partner, no matter what you've got internally, for their support. Certainly, they will lead on the strategic thinking and work very closely together. It’s about making sure that they work in tandem and in unison so it works three ways.

What’s been your boldest creative play? 

So obviously we've got governance and compliance, because we're The National Lottery, and we've got all of these games, so what comes to mind are very recent. I think the Gogglebox campaign was a fair investment that could have gone wrong, but it went very right. And with Claudia - using personalities as your spokesperson can carry its own risks, but I think the reaction that we've had from her telling stories on our behalf has turned up what we've learned with the Olympics last year. That's about getting other people to talk about your brand on your behalf, which is obviously better than us going on about it. 

And with Vicki McClure, she has the dementia choir where she's patron and ambassador,  so she might be talking about it, and we funded that over the years. So having different people from the different good causes, you know, categories like pillars, having them tell the story, and it's from the heart, rather than the head. So it's quite a bold play, because hopefully Claudia will be doing it for the next couple of years. That authenticity only helps the trust of The National Lottery. That was a fairly bold move, because she's very selective about what she does.