Jackpocket's Creative & Media Strategy
How do you scale a brand to a nearly billion-dollar exit in a market as fractured as the lottery industry?
In our Quirk Creative deep dive, Gaelan Draper (CCO of Quirk) chatted with Alison Monk (Founder and CEO of Eden Collective) to reveal the media strategy behind the explosive growth of Jackpocket. It was about a 9x growth rate driven by data-backed creative and surgical media buying (!). Some key takeaways:
Real Time Buying Strategy DMA Mastery: Alison & team navigated the messy geography of media markets, like the Philadelphia/New Jersey overlap, to ensure they were only reaching users where the app was legally available.
The Winning Hook: They learned through predictive analytics exactly when to boost spend to capture the casual players who only jump in when the prize reaches massive levels.
Why Linear TV Still Wins: In a digital-first world, Jackpocket found success in Linear TV through targeted Demographics: Their data showed that heavy lottery players were skewing older and male, frequently watching broadcast news and sports.
Real-Time Agility: Despite the manual phone call nature of buying local TV, they used it to grow and contract their presence in sync with jackpot cycles.
It’s All About Creative: As Alison notes, you can't just explain the product; you have to tap into consumer emotion. The creative was built through a process of testing and iteration, identifying what actually drives a user to convert from a viewer to a player.
The Experience: The creative from Quirk Creative moved away from narratives around simply buying a ticket and instead focused on the excitement and randomness of the gaming experience itself.
The result? A landscape-shifting success that proved that even in a manual and highly regulated industry, the right creative-media partnership can lead to an almost billion-dollar sale.
Check out the full interview below!
Transcript below:
Gaelan Draper: I'm here with Allison Monk, the CEO and founder of Eden Collective. So excited to chat with you. We have collaborated on numerous clients together. Today, here to talk about one of our clients that we shared Jackpocket. First of all, this is a dream headline. With jackpocket, you increased growth by nine times in a fractured market and led to an almost billion dollar sale. Can you talk us through what the strategy was on the media side with Jackpocket?
Alison Monk: Yeah, we partnered with Jackpocket for almost four years between 2021 until the end of 24, which was the time of their sale to DraftKings. You know, Jackpocket was a really fascinating brand. And I want to say that with this case, what we have to think about, especially when you ask the questions is, you know, what did the media landscape look like between 2021 and end of 2024, which is a slightly different landscape than it is now. Jackpocket came into the market at a super interesting time when, you know, lottery players, especially in the middle of the pandemic, who were avid lottery players could not get to a store.
So what our strategy was, was to focus on the I would say the medium to heavy existing lottery players and getting them to sort of convert behaviour to an easier solution. You don't have to drive to a store to get your lottery ticket. You can buy this ticket online.
And I think what you really have to think about in a media context like this, in some senses, where can you get the most efficient reach of these customers? So on the one hand, your mind immediately goes to precision targeting, but then you have to think about, okay, the reality is with lottery. Yes, the medium to heavy players are clearly our sweet spot, but basically anyone above the age, you know, the lottery age of 18 is able to play the lottery. So the spill outside of the core target is still relevant.
So you really have to think about the economics and the cost to reach. And that led us actually at that period of time to a linear focus strategy. That is where the older adults, the older male skewing adults were watching, particularly on broadcast, watching the news a lot, which is sort of a heavy broadcast viewership.
Gaelan Draper: Tell me a little bit about how you built this real time media strategy, because it's absolutely bonkers.
Alison Monk: So I think one of the really fascinating dynamics about lottery that we really, this was trial by fire, because, um, that's kind of trial, a little bit like, you know, when you think about, oh, do you have relevant gaming experience? The reality is lottery is a very distinct animal from traditional gaming, because what drives lottery, the size of the jack pocket, right? And there's a randomness to, of course, the size of the jackpot. And not only that, there's a very fascinating dynamic, to the duration since the last lottery was, was one.
And this seems, actually, this is a very interesting part of the story. So unlike everyone's very, especially people who are digital native, they're very used to the idea, for example, in programmatic, you can just flip media on and off. You can grow and you can contract, you know, in moments, this is not true of linear TV.
Linear media is still, there are players in the market who are going to tell you that this is not true. It is absolutely true. It is a very manual process.
It involves phone calls to reps, taking your orders, pulling them down. And so, so wild. So yes.
And so now imagine Jack pocket is only available, particularly in the beginning in a few key States. Right. Additionally, if you want to think about the complexity of the linear market to cover a linear market, you can't just call like the TV station in New Jersey, it's actually at the DMA level and the networks that the local networks that cover every single DMA are different.
So every time there was a hit in the lottery or every time the jackpot was growing, we were directing them to increase investment and decrease investment at every individual network level as the size of the jackpot grew and contracted.
Gaelan Draper: You were basically playing the lottery with these.
Alison Monk: We're basically playing the lottery. Now, there were a lot of predictive analytics. We partnered really closely with the jack pocket data science team. But, you know, what we learned along the four years was basically, you know, if it had been, for example, this isn't an example, if it had been four months since someone had last won a big chalk jackpot in a particular game, what we learned is you can start increasing your investment incrementally.
Let's say at 300 million, you'd start to boost. And then a couple months later at five. However, what we also learned through our predictive analytics are looking back historically is if the jackpot had just gone a couple of months ago, people actually waited to play until the jackpot size grew.
So also the duration from the last win also affected the size of our investment. This became a very real time system.
Gaelan Draper: And you were doing this in just like not only in a tonne of different states, but in the states that were just that it was legal in too.
Alison Monk: Like that's, yes, this is fascinating, very, very important part of the strategy. You have to be really careful about this because, you know, targeting in streaming, a lot of times you can just be paying a lot of extra money and data costs to exclude audiences. Right. And so you have to be very, very surgical about how you think about using data and whether the cost, the juice is worth the squeeze. But what's really interesting is Jackpocket was available in New Jersey and New York, but a very large percentage of Southern Jersey actually is covered by the Philadelphia DMA. And Jackpocket was not legal in Philadelphia.
So buying the Philadelphia DMA would have been enormously wasteful. And so we didn't do that. So what we did is Northern and Mid-New Jersey was covered by New York DMA, but we managed waste by surgically supporting only with streaming the Southern part of New Jersey by zip code, the part of New Jersey that was uncovered by the New York DMA. And that is how we very surgically covered and minimised waste in managing the DMA challenges of spill across states. You're on the media buying side. We're on the creative side.
Gaelan Draper: I have to ask, how important was it to have a diverse set of creatives for Jackpocket?
Alison Monk: Look, the single most important variable, no matter what we do in media, the single most important driving variable. And by the way, we've seen this in our work together across other clients too, is creative. You can have the best media plan in the world and if you do not explain to clients what you do and why they should care. And this seems like a very basic fact that I actually see rarely, rarely in a lot of cases, you know, brands, clients often underestimate the importance of what is the job of creative for a brand that has basically zero level of brand awareness, right? And what creative has permission to do if there's a fundamental underlying awareness and understanding of both the brand and what the product is and what it does. And I think people who do not understand, which is something you guys do exceptionally well. And I think what was so effective about your work for this is just because you need to explain what something is and what it does, doesn't mean it can't also engage and entertain. Education does not need to be devoid of engagement and entertainment. And I think this is an exciting product. You know, we tapped into consumer emotion and it worked.
Gaelan Draper: Completely agree with everything you said. Always a pleasure to chat with you. Thank you so much for coming on and talking about Jackpocket.
Alison Monk: Pleasure. I look forward to working with you guys more. Let's do it.