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All talk: Instant Kiwi and Running With Scissors dial up the style with quirky new range

In an effort to attract a “social, lively and stylish urban audience” to a product not usually associated with such phrases, NZ Lotteries and Running with Scissors have just launched a new range of Instant Kiwi tickets. And marketing manager Robert Saunders says it’s the biggest facelift for the tickets since it started selling them back in 1989. 

Saunders says the idea behind the ‘Say It’ range, which was around one year in the making, was to have something that was unique, fun and conversational and he says “there’s nothing like these tickets internationally”.

Running with Scissors had thought of everything,” he says. “Their treatment of our brief was thorough, detailed and absolutely challenged the way we do things. The holistic approach to interrogating each element of the Instant Kiwi product and experience has resulted in a comprehensive and clever product that is cheeky, witty, fun and engaging. Most importantly it sets a platform for on-going development.”

Running with Scissor’s boss Friday O’Flaherty says it was a great project for the agency to be involved in, as it involved scrutinising the entire ticket purchase process and ticket format, right down to the terms and conditions, and developing a new product. And it is also involved in the marketing and promotion of the new tickets alongside Interbrand, with a campaign covering radio, online, outdoor, sampling, social media, PR and point of sale (O’Flaherty says all activity is concentrated on the target market, meaning niche media choices as opposed to mass awareness, and the communications aim to engage and entertain from that first point of contact). 

The agency teamed up with designer Brogen Averill, who was behind The Department Store and often works with Karen Walker, to craft the tickets and O’Flaherty says the agency called on seven different copywriters with diverse writing backgrounds to come up with the unexpected, quirky sayings that are designed to make people smile, laugh or wonder”. In keeping with the agency’s collaborative style, he says artists, actors, musicians and a fashion
designer all contributed throughout idea generation to help explore new ticket
options. 

“We think these will be popular with our current Instant Kiwi fans, but will also be even more appealing to a different audience that doesn’t necessarily play Instant Kiwi already,” says Saunders. “With a full scratch panel, each ticket reveals one of a myriad of messages and provides the player with the chance to win up to $50,000 or a multitude of other cash prizes. This new ticket range is different to anything we’ve ever done before, it’s very exciting and will definitely give happy winners something to talk about.” 

Under the watch of 2011 marketer of the year Wendy Rayner, Instant Kiwi, which launched the very entertaining It Pays to Push Your Luck campaign last year, was “completely pulled apart and built back up again” in 2010 to try and recruit a new audience. And it worked, with a TVNZ-NZ Marketing Award in the FMCG category to prove it. And as she said at the time: ”You’ve got to keep it fresh. You’ve gotta do relaunches. And they can’t just be comms all the time. You’ve gotta change more than that to try to keep them interested.”

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