NY Lotto Putting the Sexy Back Into Scratch-Off
Original Source: http://gothamist.com
Author: Ben Yakas
Original Publication Date: February 15, 2010
“Too sexy…to resist…”
Get a load of Lotto’s new look! This is not your grandmother’s cluttered blue and green scratch-off—no, this is the new, sleeker, hipper, black-label version: the New York Lottery Black scratch-off ticket. With the economic downturn in full thrust, ticket sales dwindled for the New York State Lottery. But a silver lining emerged: the chance for Gordon Medencia, the envelope-pushing, Mad Men-esque renegade director of the NY Lotto, to push for his minimalist black design, “against the advice of vendors and his own sales staff” no less! He told the Times, “The black American Express card, Johnny Walker Black: These were all the images we were trying to get in our mind.”
Ads were placed all over town, some with the seductive refrain, “Acquire one today,” others with just the image of the ticket, one the Times calls, “smoky, mysterious, obsidian.” Now that the initial run of the scratch-offs has been distributed to vendors across the city, the experiment of morphing lottery tickets into luxury items seems to have been deemed a success by the industry, and especially by ad executive Leo Mamorsky, who worked on the product: “The whole imagery in advertising of nightlife, black limos, the black Escalades, there’s a degree of allure and sexiness attached to that.” You can add scratch-offs to that list now, sir.
