The National Lottery’s decision to invest heavily in marketing over the past three years and throughout the pandemic is “starting to pay dividends”, according to Camelot CMO Keith Moor.
Talking this morning (9 February) at an event hosted by YouGov, Moor said: “The organisation has been building a very definitive story about what the brand has delivered to society and the value players have delivered back to the communities we live in. And I think this is starting to pay dividends.
“It’s not just a series of activation type promotions, where we talk about draws and games all the time. Actually, there’s a heavy investment in where the money goes, in terms of telling me what’s going on. I think it’s been a very conscious effort to do that and that’s what started to pay dividends.”
Camelot has launched two major campaigns over the past few years, one to mark its 25th anniversary and the other to highlight its community fund and how the money it makes supports good causes.
This activity lead it to achieve its highest ever overall BrandIndex score of 8.1 in 2020 surging from 1.9 in 2019 and making it the second most improved brand last year.
The company also improved on other metrics such as buzz, which grew from 5.5 to 9.2, while ad awareness increased from 27.7 to 29.6 and purchase consideration from 30.8 to 35.
YouGov head of data products, Amelia Brophy, said: “What we’ve seen with the National Lottery is there’s been consistent improvement and consistent focus on some of these particular areas by the brand to drive these results.”
Talking specifically about the two campaigns it has launched, she added “we can see creative uplifts among both ad awareness and purchase consideration but the uplifts continued after the campaign periods”.
The most improved brand last year, according to YouGov, was Netflix, with its BrandIndex score increasing from 35.1 to 42.2. Meanwhile, Amazon Prime was the third most improved brand, jumping from 15.2 to 21.8 and Ryanair, while still in negative territory, was the fourth most improved, rising from -31 to -24.8.
Moor noted the “natural reaction for a lot of brands was to pull away” from marketing during the pandemic but he says there were opportunities to take advantage, with some media offering “incredible value”.
“Some brands weren’t able to respond immediately to digital opportunities. It’s not something that every brand can do. But also there’s an act of responsibility that had to be undertaken, so you didn’t want to drive people into physical environments by continuing to push product in in a certain type of way,” he said.
“However, the reality was media was incredible value. It has been all year since April onwards, this summer in particular; phenomenal value. And so that collapse in price is an opportunity for a client.”