Lotto New Zealand Takes Powerball Suspense to Antarctic Extremes
Lotto New Zealand's 'Imagine On Ice' is a 90-second narrative film produced by DDB Aotearoa and released in New Zealand in August 2021, built around the insight that people deliberately delay checking a Powerball ticket in order to prolong the excitement of imagining a win.
The campaign launched on 8 August 2021 across digital and social media channels, with Campaign Brief reporting its arrival to the New Zealand market the following day. The film follows a group of workmates who take the concept of postponing gratification to an extreme conclusion, staging the ticket check in the isolation of Antarctica. That premise anchors the narrative in a relatable human behaviour — the conscious suspension of certainty — while amplifying it to the point of absurdity, giving the film both emotional warmth and genuine comedic tension.
'Imagine On Ice' is the fifth major execution of the long-running 'Imagine' platform that DDB Aotearoa developed for Lotto New Zealand from 2015, according to reporting across nzmarketingmag.co.nz and campaignbrief.co.nz. That platform is built around the emotional experience of anticipation rather than the mechanics of a lottery draw, positioning Lotto not merely as a route to financial gain but as a facilitator of shared imaginative possibility. Previous instalments in the series — including 'Pirate Ship' and 'Pops' Gift' in 2015, 'Mum's Wish' in 2016, and 'Armoured Truck' in 2018 — established an audience expectation for character-led storytelling, and 'Imagine On Ice' continues that lineage with an escalated sense of adventure and geographical drama specific to the New Zealand experience.
In New Zealand, where Lotto draws form part of the social fabric of workplaces and communities, the workgroup setting grounds the film in familiar territory even as the Antarctic backdrop transforms it into something cinematic. The campaign carries a Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100, reflecting a competent and emotionally coherent execution within a well-established creative platform.
DDB Aotearoa identified a specific and counterintuitive consumer behaviour as the strategic engine of 'Imagine On Ice.' Lottery players in New Zealand do not always rush to check their tickets. The act of leaving the result unknown is itself a form of enjoyment — a protected pocket of hope that dissolves the moment the numbers are confirmed or denied. DDB Aotearoa's Chief Planning Officer Rupert Price and the broader planning team recognised this delay not as procrastination but as an active emotional choice, according to campaignbrief.co.nz, and built the entire campaign rationale around it.
This insight connects the campaign to the broader 'Imagine' platform philosophy, which has consistently prioritised the journey of imagining over the destination of winning since its 2015 launch as reported by nzmarketingmag.co.nz. The platform represents a strategic departure from conventional lottery advertising, which typically centres on jackpot size, odds, or the spectacle of the draw itself. By contrast, 'Imagine On Ice' makes no overt claim about prize amounts and gives almost no attention to the mechanics of Powerball itself. The brand's competitive advantage, in this framing, is the emotional experience it enables rather than the product it sells.
In the New Zealand gambling market, Lotto New Zealand operates as the state-owned lottery authority, facing a consumer landscape shaped by increasing digital entertainment alternatives and shifting attitudes toward discretionary spending. Competitors for audience attention and wallet share include TAB New Zealand, which serves the sports betting segment of the New Zealand market, and SkyCity Entertainment Group, which operates casino-based gaming across New Zealand. Against those alternatives, Lotto's 'Imagine' platform stakes out a distinct emotional register — communal, optimistic, and grounded in everyday New Zealand life — that differentiates the brand without resorting to promotion of jackpot scale. The workgroup setting in 'Imagine On Ice' reinforces that communal dimension, reflecting the reality that in New Zealand workplaces, Lotto syndicates are a genuine social ritual.
Director Jamie Lawrence helmed 'Imagine On Ice' for production company Eight, bringing a cinematic sensibility to a brief that required both comedy and emotional authenticity in equal measure. The film's production transported its ensemble cast to an Antarctic-adjacent visual environment, using the stark isolation and scale of that landscape to externalise the internal experience of suspended anticipation — a formal choice that gave the campaign its most memorable and distinctive quality.
The creative team at DDB Aotearoa was led by Chief Creative Officer Damon Stapleton and Executive Creative Director Gary Steele, with Creative Directors Brett Colliver and Mike Felix shaping the narrative execution, according to campaignbrief.co.nz. Agency Producer Claire Colohan managed production alongside Executive Producer Judy Thompson at Eight. The collaboration between agency and production company produced a film whose craft ambition matched its conceptual ambition — an alignment that is not always guaranteed when a campaign attempts to work simultaneously as comedy, character study, and brand film.
Campaign Asia, in a review published on 13 August 2021, praised the film's storytelling, characterisation, and production quality, with reviewer Ad Nut noting an audible gasp at the cliffhanger ending and commending the emotional authenticity of the Antarctic isolation depicted on screen, as reported by campaignbrief.co.nz. That response speaks to Lawrence's directorial control over tonal register: the film earns its emotional payoff by committing fully to character and situation before deploying its central narrative turn. The workmates are drawn with enough specificity to feel like real New Zealand colleagues rather than advertising archetypes, a quality that makes the absurdist premise land with warmth rather than detachment. The 90-second runtime allows the narrative sufficient room to breathe — a structural decision that reflects confidence in the audience's appetite for story over sloganeering in the New Zealand market.
'Imagine On Ice' recorded more than 200,000 views on YouTube, according to publicly available data cited by campaignbrief.co.nz and corroborated by Clapboard's own records. That figure represents a meaningful level of organic engagement for a New Zealand market campaign, where total population scale naturally limits the absolute size of domestic digital audiences compared with campaigns targeting larger English-speaking markets.
The film accumulated 63 likes and two comments on YouTube at the time of recording, figures that reflect a view-to-engagement ratio consistent with brand film content that audiences consume passively rather than interact with publicly — a pattern common to emotionally resonant long-form narrative advertising. No campaign-specific awards for 'Imagine On Ice' are documented across Cannes Lions, the Effie Awards, One Show, D&AD, the Clio Awards, or the Webby Awards based on publicly available records at the time of writing.
The structural effectiveness of the campaign rests on several durable foundations. It extends a platform — 'Imagine' — that has accumulated audience familiarity and emotional equity across six years of consistent New Zealand market deployment, according to nzmarketingmag.co.nz. It resolves a genuine consumer insight into a specific and scalable narrative format. And it deploys a production quality that signals brand seriousness without alienating the mass-market audience that Lotto New Zealand must serve. The campaign's Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100 reflects a well-crafted execution that advances an established platform rather than redefining it — a distinction that honours the creative achievement while noting the ceiling that platform maturity can impose on breakthrough potential.
'Imagine On Ice' is a 90-second brand film created by DDB Aotearoa for Lotto New Zealand, released in August 2021. It follows a group of workmates who travel to Antarctica to delay checking a Powerball ticket, dramatising the emotional insight that postponing a result prolongs the joy of imagining a win.
Jamie Lawrence directed 'Imagine On Ice' for production company Eight. The DDB Aotearoa creative team included Chief Creative Officer Damon Stapleton, Executive Creative Director Gary Steele, and Creative Directors Brett Colliver and Mike Felix, according to campaignbrief.co.nz.
'Imagine On Ice' is the fifth major execution of the 'Imagine' platform, which DDB Aotearoa launched for Lotto New Zealand in 2015. Previous instalments include 'Pirate Ship', 'Mum's Wish', and 'Armoured Truck', each built around imagining life after a lottery win, according to nzmarketingmag.co.nz.
'Imagine On Ice' recorded more than 200,000 views on YouTube, according to campaignbrief.co.nz. For a campaign produced for the New Zealand market, that figure represents a strong level of organic digital reach given the country's comparatively small total population and audience scale.
'Imagine On Ice' holds a Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100. The score reflects a well-crafted execution of an established creative platform, recognising the film's narrative quality and emotional coherence while noting that the 'Imagine' series format, by 2021, carried inherent familiarity rather than surprise.
DDB Aotearoa built 'Imagine On Ice' around the observation that New Zealand lottery players sometimes delay checking tickets to preserve hope and extend excitement. Chief Planning Officer Rupert Price's team identified this deliberate postponement as an active emotional behaviour, making anticipation — not winning — the campaign's central proposition.
.webp)
Creative Collaboration Platform: The Backbone of Modern Creative WorkWhat is a creative collaboration platform?Clapboard defines a creative collaboration platform as the operational core for today’s distributed creative teams. This is not a collection of digital collaboration tools stitched together; Clapboard’s system
Understanding the Creative Production MarketplaceWhat is a Creative Production Marketplace?Clapboard defines a creative production marketplace as a structured ecosystem where brands, agencies, and production talent converge to execute video, advertising, and branded content at scale. Unlike the legacy agency or freelanREAD FULL ARTICLE
The Urgent Need for a Creative Production Operating SystemWhy Traditional Creative Production Models Break DownClapboard sees the creative production landscape shifting under pressure. Content velocity is no longer a buzzword—it’s a mandate. Modern advertising demands relentless output across dozens of channels, each wREAD FULL ARTICLE
.jpg&w=256&q=75)
