National Lottery spreads the joy in new film by Adam&EveDDB

The new campaign puts the focus on the community

By Creative Salon

27 June 2022

Adam&eveDDB has created a new campaign with National Lottery operator Camelot highlighting how a winning ticket can bring a whole community together.

The campaign marks a new chapter for National Lottery advertising, focusing on the joy of winning and how it makes a difference to not just one person, but to many. Over the past few years, Camelot has been highlighting the £30 million a week that National Lottery players raise for Good Causes, including funding British athletes and helping communities through the pandemic.

The new TV ad, directed by The Bobbsey Twins from Homicide, tells the story of how amazing things happen when you win on The National Lottery. We see the central character in the film, Mo, celebrating his winning ticket in a real-life retailer before the ticket escapes from his hand and is blown away by the wind. He chases after it, with the shopkeeper rushing to his aid, kick-starting an increasingly dramatic and fantastical quest to recover the winning ticket. By the end, the whole community has come together to help their beloved neighbour chase down the ticket, evading their grasp at every gust of wind through a busy market-place, down the high street, onto a football pitch, and into a block of flats, before finally arriving back in Mo’s hands.

At its heart, it is a great British caper full of jeopardy and humour, providing much-needed levity at a time of significant pressure for many in the UK. It will run during the Women’s Euro 2022 and The Commonwealth Games in Birmingham, which will draw crowds across the nation to celebrate many of the athletes who have benefited from National Lottery funding, including Women’s England football player Ellen White and Paralympian Hannah Cockroft OBE – both of whom feature in the ad. Ellen White will also front complementary National Lottery football-themed content which will run alongside the campaign.

The campaign will air over the course of the year, starting with a seven-week burst on TV, VOD, Social, Digital, OOH and Digital Display, including a 120” version of the film that will appear on YouTube. The entire campaign highlights the amazing moment when people come together to celebrate a win on The National Lottery, captioned by the brand’s long-standing tagline: “Your numbers make amazing happen.”

Online viewers will also be retargeted with a bespoke ad highlighting the National Lottery app. This features a tongue-in-cheek message about never losing your ticket like the central character: “Don’t be like Mo, just play on the app”.

Matt Ridsdale, Executive Director at Camelot, said: “Following the amazing Platinum Jubilee weekend that brought millions of people together, this fun, quintessentially British, joy-filled piece of entertainment is brimming with positivity about the power of community. For the last five years, we’ve been telling the stories of what National Lottery funding does. With more than £30 million raised for Good Causes each week, it supports a huge array of projects – from local initiatives making a difference where we live, to powering our nations' athletes at the Olympic and Paralympic Games. Now we want to tell the story of winning and how that can also bring people together. After all, The National Lottery creates millions of winners every week and, on average, a new millionaire nearly every day. What better time to do that than during the Women’s Euro 2022 and Commonwealth Games, which will once again give us fantastic moments of national togetherness.”

Ben Tollett, Group Executive Creative Director, adam&eveDDB, adds: “The moment we had the idea about someone losing their winning ticket, it felt rather special. All we had to do was hold onto it really, really, tightly and not let go.”