Sweet Million Ads Too Cute to Resist

In September 2009, the New York Lottery introduced a lottery game called Sweet Million. At first glance, it seems like a standard lottery game, where you pay $1, pick six numbers then see if those numbers match the numbers pulled in the drawings held every Monday and Thursday. The ad campaign behind Sweet Million, however, is anything but average. In fact, it may be one of the most creative, not to mention cute, ad campaigns I have ever seen.

The ad campaign consists of television commercials and billboard ads. Small animals, such as bunnies, kittens and puppies are shown at their most cute, generally playing together, falling asleep or dressed in cute outfits. The ads then contain the repetitive catchphrase: "Sweet Million is sweeter than sweet, which is pretty sweet."

The ads are very effective, even though they explain very little about the actual lottery game. They caught my attention immediately, and I found myself wondering, "Why are there all of these cute animals?" I ended up searching for Sweet Million on Google, which then led me to the website for the lottery game. The website itself is somewhat difficult to navigate at first, mainly because the navigation buttons are less prominent than even more cute animals.

Sweet Million's television ads are much more effective than the billboard ads, although the television ads have a somewhat jarring ending. The television ad includes the catchphrase at the end of the commercial in big, bright letters, but also has an unnecessarily loud announcer. The billboard ads, however, have inexplicably decided to include the catchphrase in bright pink. Considering a driver will often only have a split second to glance at a billboard while driving by, the lettering will lead to many people to see a bunch of cute animals, but have absolutely no clue what the ad was advertising. The television ads may be jarring, but the billboard ads are thoroughly confusing.

The crux of the advertisement campaign is present in both types of ads. Cute animals are very popular, as evidenced by the website cuteoverload.com, which features thousands of cute animal pictures, and the search results for "cute animals" on Youtube, which turns up over 80,000 results (not to mention the many more that can be found if you substitute a specific animal type in for the word "animals"). The Sweet Million ads capitalize on this popularity, drawing the viewer in with an inundation of cuteness and then hitting them with the catchphrase. The ads are deliberately vague enough that the viewer is left wanting and wondering, in the hopes that they will search on the web for "Sweet Million" to find out what the game is all about.

It's still yet to be seen whether people will actually flock to Sweet Million or if they will be turned off by the odds of winning the million (1:3,838,380). What's not up for debate is the simple fact that the ad campaign is ultra cute, and quite possibly genius in its use of niche marketing.

Resources:

http://sweetmillion.com

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/21/sweet-million-lottery-gam_n_294016.html