“This game within a game was a simple but effective means to engage with fans while also offering an incentive for live viewing and a complementary second screen experience.” —Jill Toloza
“Retro design and gameplay is a tricky thing to get right, but this project nails it. I also think the real-world integration—scan QR code on TV to start game—is a fun feature; QR codes are ubiquitous these days but are rarely used properly.” —Husani Oakley
Overview: Typically, the Ohio Lottery Commission provides fun in-person engagements at Progressive Field, home of the Cleveland baseball team. But during the COVID-19 pandemic, with fans watching from home, ad agency Marcus Thomas LLC had to think of a way to engage them through their TVs. The 8 Bit At Bat interactive experience gives fans a chance to win $100 every eighth inning of every home game by successfully guessing what the batter will do.
The Ohio Lottery Commission purchased home plate signage, added a QR code, and encouraged interested fans to scan and play along.
Within 20 games, 8 Bit At Bat received more than 4,000 scans, more than 1,000 new MyLotto Rewards members and more than two minutes of engagement time per scan.
A multidisciplinary team, drawing from every department at Marcus Thomas LLC, completed the project in four weeks.
Comments by Marcus Thomas LLC:
What presented the biggest challenge in executing this project? “Timing. With the already shortened baseball season, the Marcus Thomas team came up with the idea after live televised baseball had returned. In order to get it going, we had to get the Ohio Lottery Commission on board, and then get everything up and running with enough games left to make an impact. Multiple disciplines across the agency rallied together to pull this off within a matter of four weeks, from concept to going live.”
Was the target audience a particularly difficult one to reach? “Ohio Lottery players are a very diverse group, and there are multiple layers to this audience. But with certain activations, we always like to say our audience is anyone and everyone above the age of eighteen, which can be hard to attain, let alone please. This was a new type of engagement for us to bring to any audience. However, with it being an experience instead of a traditional ad and tying it into our core beliefs of fun and optimism, we were happy to see we had a nice increase in sign-ups for the MyLotto Rewards program. This was a good sign we engaged with someone we might not normally have.”
