over 45 years old. I am very confident that the National Premium
Game, with national marketing and a national TV Game Show, is
going to bring new people into the game and that will be a power-
ful driver of increased consumer participation. Ultimately, I am
held accountable for how much money we return to the state. But
I also need to ensure that sales grow in a responsible manner. To
me, that means getting more people to participate in the games as
opposed to increasing the spend of our core players. I think the
National Premium Game not only helps us to grow our revenues, it
does so in a sustainable and responsible way.
R. Hargrove:
Stephen is enthusiastic about the national mar-
keting campaign for the NPG. Charlie?
C. McIntyre:
Likewise. We all just saw a fabulous presenta-
tion from the DC Lottery. Buddy (Roogow) and Tracey (Cohen)
compared the best practices and benchmarks of the major con-
sumer products companies to those in the lottery industry. The
brand must be established on the national stage. And that’s just the
start. The long-term model, the success of the National Premium
Game, along with the continued success of Mega Millions and
Powerball, depends on leveraging the foundation for brand exten-
sion. New games, new brands, can be introduced to a market that
has already bonded with our flagship brands. Coke had a built-in
market for Coke-Light and then Coke-Zero and who knows how
many extensions of the brand they could do. When I was a kid,
each brand of sneakers, or tennis shoes, had one model. Nike and
Adidas and others have since extended their brand to have lots and
lots of models, a different shoe for a mass market of consumer pro-
files that is further and further subdivided. These concepts for fully
leveraging the power of the brands we have, and adding onto it a
plan for systematically extending the brands with the introduction
of new products, should be done on a national scale. They need to
be done on a national scale because they simply would not work
well on an individual state level.
The scale is required for lots of reasons. For one thing, the cost
to each lottery for developing the concepts and then the games,
managing the projects, implementing the business plans, manag-
ing the games on an ongoing basis, will be much less if shared
among all forty five lotteries instead of being done on a single state
basis. Second, the effectiveness of our advertising and promotion
could be much improved with a nationalized, or at least regional-
ized, approach to media purchase and planning.
As Stephen suggests, the NPG is a new type of game, different
from our current mega-jackpot games. This will provide us with
a platform to tell a new story in a fresh and different way. As we
move forward with the NPG, let’s think about things like brand
extension along with a nationalized approach to our media buys
and brand imaging. Too, I think we will discover new ways of
managing this industry that we will be able to apply to our other
multi-state games.
R. Hargrove:
On the subject of national marketing, Gary,
could you comment on the national telecast that’s going to be
tied to the National Premium Game and what you think that may
bring to the party.
G. Grief:
The NPG is designed to create lots of millionaires
instead of a small number of multi-millionaires. This will appeal
to the many people who protest that it does not make sense to give
a $600 million jackpot to one person when you could make 600
people millionaires instead. That’s always a great sound bite. But
what people say does not always match up to how they behave.
We know that it’s the huge jackpots that drive Mega Millions and
Powerball. But now, the NPG will allow us to appeal to that buyer
desire for more millionaires instead of one big winner, without
altering the appeal of the mega-jackpot-driven games. Another ex-
citing thing about the NPG is the $5 price point. That is an entry
point we’ve never had on a national scale for a draw game. Now,
we need to incorporate what Connie and Charlie mentioned about
the portfolio approach. We know there’s a market for the addi-
tional price-points and the NPG will take care of that niche of the
$5 price-point.
Then there is the TV Game Show - nothing like this has ever
been done before, at least nothing remotely close to the scale of
what this will be. This is a chance for us to reach new players who
may not be excited about the traditional lottery games sold at the
convenience store. A game show that features lots of people being
turned into millionaires is something so new and different, it has
the potential to tap into an entirely new buyer motive and bring
in entirely new consumer groups. Augmenting all of that with a
national advertising and promotional program will further differ-
entiate the NPG.
The NPG depends on scale and that depends on maximum par-
ticipation from all the state lotteries. I hope everyone appreciates
the magnitude of impact that the NPG could have, and communi-
cates that to their boards and commissioners and legislative bodies
so that you can all be a part of the October 19 launch.
C. Laverty O’Connor:
Absolutely. Many states are fiercely
jackpot dependent. For instance, in Indiana, even though instant
sales are up by 12%, and non-jackpot games are up 17% year-
over-year, the factor that determines whether we hit our budget is
the jackpot games, whether there is a jackpot run that drives those
sales. We’re an industry where we actually make our budgets or
miss our budgets by what happens to the jackpot. The NPG will
be such a welcome addition to the portfolio of national games.
Instants are a big part of everyone’s business, and we all appreci-
ate the profit contributed by Instants. But building the high-margin
draw games contributes much more to the bottom-line funding for
Good Causes, and that’s what the NPG will do. With a 54% prize-
payout, including the TV Game Show prizes, instead of the 60%
to78% prize payout of the Instants, the NPG will be a welcome
contributor to net proceeds. The cohesive multidimensional prop-
erties of this game, its ability to draw in new players, a design that
includes digital and TV overlay features—the NPG has the poten-
tial to reshape our industry’s approach to national games and add
vitality to the lottery brand. Compliments to MDI, and the commu-
nity of lottery directors, for the five years of effort to develop this
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