Better odds through sharper design

In October 2022, the Digital Acquisition team at Breast Cancer Now asked us to support them to acquire new players for their Pink Ribbon Lottery. Our design team was commissioned to produce dynamic, eye-catching new creative assets to power the campaign and cut through on social feeds.

Thus far, the role of digital in acquiring Pink Ribbon players had been important, with clear room to grow numbers across social platforms. As with all charities offering this product, the challenge was in continuing to speak to new users amidst the noise of social platforms.

The team at Breast Cancer Now had strong historical results to guide our design team: prize-led and winner-focused creatives resonated with particular audience sets, and there were existing creatives in place as foundational, “control” assets for 2022’s campaign. We were asked to create a fresh series of static ads for use on social platforms targeting future new lottery players from across the UK. Our primary audience was women aged 30-65+.

"Part of the design brief was to reimagine how the brand assets and colours could be used. So, to address that in this concept, we decided to pair a dark background with highly contrasting colourful lottery balls. The aim was to have a high-energy, bold design that draws the user's attention and provides a strong contrast between the text and background for optimum legibility and accessibility.

Candid winner photography was used, showing that everyday people are winning prizes. This should increase the persuasiveness of the ads by making the prospect of winning feel more plausible and relatable to the audience.

For future ads in this style, images of the beneficiaries of the lottery money could be used, helping to more emotively and tangibly reinforce the cause message."

“We know that one of the major reasons people play the Pink Ribbon Lottery is because the cause is important to them, and it’s a fun way to make a difference.

We took two routes with these ads. The first focused solely on the cause and aimed to evoke a sense of community by asking the viewer to join in. Being part of something is powerful. We tapped into this by using words like ‘together’ to show that every player's support is important and helps to make a real difference.

The second route paired cause with benefit for the player. We wanted to clearly show that by playing, not only would they be helping a worthy cause, but they might win something for themselves too.”

“The other creative routes used a lot of heavy colour so we wanted to test a visually lighter approach that was less bold.

The darker typography and light background colours create an elegant design as well as maintaining a strong contrast between design elements. Where possible, we aim to make our designs accessible so they can be experienced by the widest audience.

Clean and legible typography is at the heart of this concept but we enhanced that with subtle annotation style illustrations which highlight the key prize message. These expressive illustrations feel human and stand out from the rigid social media app UI.”

“Turning a tiny amount of money into a much larger sum is a really tempting prospect, and especially if you can do it whilst having fun too. This was the main idea behind the copy for this set of ads, and we wanted to keep it simple, bold and a bit in-your-face.

We also wanted viewers to feel like this was a real possibility. As a player you stand a pretty good chance of winning on the Pink Ribbon Lottery, and the ‘157 winners every week’ stat provided a nice way to highlight this.”

“Through the relatable copy in this concept we prompt the audience to think about what they would do if they won lottery prize money. Once the audience starts visualising scenarios we think they’d feel more motivated to play the lottery.

We emphasised the ribbon asset as a way to embed the lottery brand identity and one of the core brand typefaces lent itself well to being adapted into a fluid ribbon graphic.

This creative route aimed to jump out to the audience with the vivid pink foreground graphics contrasting well against the high energy yellow background.”

“This concept took the previous version one step further, by using relatable items and experiences to help viewers visualise exactly what they could do with the money. By encouraging viewers to daydream about how they’d spend the money, we can help them feel excited about the thought of playing and the possibilities it could bring.

We wanted to make sure the items mentioned were realistic and appealing to our audience, so each one was something previous winners had told us they were spending the money on. We included their first name and the amount they won to help highlight this further.”

We’re thrilled to report that the results of the campaign exceeded expectations, reaching 31% above our targets for player acquisition this year. Additionally, the campaign's cost per acquisition (CPA) was impressively 49% lower compared to the previous year.