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How Minnesota State Lottery Made Gnomes the Stars of Local Pride
Minnesota State Lottery's 'Uff Da and Lefse, Meat Raffle, Gnome Town' campaign is a three-part film series produced by Periscope in May 2017 that uses gnome characters to celebrate distinctly Minnesotan cultural landmarks and traditions across the United States market, according to Mnlottery.
Minnesota State Lottery launched the campaign in May 2017 as a cultural celebration rather than a conventional product push. The creative premise rests on a simple and confident idea: Minnesota is full of hidden and not-so-hidden treasures, and the people and places that define those treasures deserve to be spotlighted, according to Lotterypost. Rather than casting human actors in conventional slice-of-life roles, the campaign personified its subjects through gnomes — folkloric figures that carry an inherent whimsy while remaining deeply rooted in Scandinavian heritage, itself a significant thread in Minnesota's cultural fabric.
The campaign comprises three distinct media assets, each anchored to a specific Minnesotan reference point: Uff Da and Lefse, Meat Raffle, and Gnome Town. Each film stands on its own as a cultural vignette, yet together they form a coherent portrait of Minnesota identity. The associated hashtag, #OnlyinMN, functions as both a social amplifier and a declaration of geographic pride, inviting audiences to claim and share what makes the state singular. Production was handled by Committee Films, with editorial completed in-house at Periscope. The campaign was created by Minneapolis-based agency Periscope for Minnesota State Lottery, situating its creative roots firmly in the market it addresses, according to Ditchedit. In the United States, state lottery advertising operates under significant regulatory and ethical scrutiny, making cultural resonance a particularly effective — and defensible — creative strategy. The Clapboard Score for this campaign is 63 out of 100, reflecting solid local creative craft within the constraints of a regulated gambling category.
Periscope grounded the campaign in a strategic insight that is straightforward but easily overlooked in lottery advertising: residents of a distinctive regional culture respond more powerfully to recognition than to aspiration. Minnesota carries a markedly specific cultural identity — Scandinavian heritage, Lutheran understatement, a tradition of communal rituals like the meat raffle, and an almost defiant pride in local vernacular — and the campaign treats all of this as creative capital rather than local colour.
The strategic context in the United States lottery market in 2017 provides important framing. According to La Fleur's, U.S. traditional lottery sales totalled approximately seventy-one billion dollars in fiscal year 2017. Within that market, draw-based games fell to approximately twenty-five point eight billion dollars, representing thirty-six percent of total traditional sales and declining from thirty-nine percent the prior year, per La Fleur's. Instant tickets, by contrast, represented approximately sixty-three percent of traditional sales in the same period, according to La Fleur's. These figures indicate a category under structural pressure, where brand differentiation through emotional and cultural connection becomes a meaningful lever for sustaining player engagement.
Minnesota State Lottery operates in a competitive landscape that includes not only other state-run lottery products but also the expanding pull of digital gaming and competitive sweepstakes platforms. Neighbouring state lotteries such as the Wisconsin Lottery and Iowa Lottery pursue broadly similar audiences in the Upper Midwest, often relying on jackpot-led messaging that emphasises prize scale over local identity. Against that backdrop, Periscope's decision to anchor the Minnesota State Lottery's voice in cultural specificity — gnomes, Uff Da, lefse — creates differentiation that jackpot parity cannot easily replicate. According to Startribune.com, agency transitions have shaped the lottery's creative history, with Olson succeeding Colle+McVoy in 2010 before Periscope later took on the account, suggesting the lottery has consistently sought agencies capable of building a distinct brand voice in the United States market.
Committee Films produced the campaign under the creative direction of Periscope. Production credits beyond the production company are not publicly documented in available sources for this campaign. What the finished films demonstrate is a production sensibility that treats Minnesota not as backdrop but as protagonist — the locations, objects, and rituals depicted are not set dressing but the primary narrative subject.
The choice of gnomes as the campaign's central character device is the most distinctive creative decision on record. Gnomes carry a dual resonance in the Minnesota context: they connect to the Scandinavian heritage that shaped much of the state's cultural character, and they introduce an element of folk whimsy that softens the commercial intent of a gambling advertiser without obscuring it. The gnomes, as Clapboard's editorial notes, have a life of their own — they are not mascots in the traditional advertising sense but characters embedded in a world that feels genuinely observed rather than constructed.
Each of the three films operates as a self-contained tonal piece. Uff Da and Lefse draws on Norwegian-American vernacular — 'uff da' functioning as a culturally loaded exclamation — and the lefse flatbread as a culinary marker of community. Meat Raffle centres on a tradition found in Minnesota bars and community halls, where cuts of meat serve as raffle prizes, a practice so specific to the region that it functions almost as a cultural shibboleth. Gnome Town extends the character logic of the campaign into its most literal expression. Across all three, the film medium allows Periscope to build atmosphere and warmth that static formats cannot achieve, leaning into the storytelling capacity of the moving image to make the audience feel seen rather than sold to. The #OnlyinMN hashtag reinforces this by framing the work as an invitation to participation rather than a broadcast.
No verified performance data for the 'Uff Da and Lefse, Meat Raffle, Gnome Town' campaign is publicly available. No records of sales lift, market-share movement, brand-tracking data, or return on investment figures have been documented in publicly accessible sources. Similarly, no award recognitions from Cannes Lions, the Effie Awards, the One Show, D&AD, Clio, or the Webby Awards are on record for this campaign.
Structural analysis, however, supports a reasoned assessment of the campaign's likely effectiveness within its market. The decision to produce three distinct films rather than a single executional asset suggests a deliberate investment in content depth and platform flexibility. In the United States lottery category, where La Fleur's data shows draw-based game revenue was under meaningful pressure in 2017, a brand campaign that builds emotional equity rather than simply promoting a product addresses a real strategic need. The cultural specificity of the creative — gnomes, Uff Da, meat raffles, lefse — operates as a natural filter that concentrates relevance among Minnesotan audiences while generating curiosity-led engagement from broader audiences encountering the #OnlyinMN framing on social platforms.
Periscope's subsequent work for Minnesota State Lottery, including the 'I'MN' brand campaign launched in July 2017 with a new tagline described as a rally cry, according to available agency documentation, suggests the cultural identity approach established in this campaign had sufficient internal momentum to evolve into a broader brand platform. That continuity is itself an indicator of strategic confidence in the creative direction. The Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100 reflects a campaign that executes its local-cultural brief with genuine craft and clear strategic logic, held back from higher distinction by the absence of documented impact data and the inherent creative ceiling of highly localised subject matter.
Minnesota State Lottery's 'Uff Da and Lefse, Meat Raffle, Gnome Town' campaign is a three-part film series created by Periscope in May 2017. It uses gnome characters to celebrate distinctive Minnesota cultural traditions and locations, unified by the hashtag #OnlyinMN, positioning the lottery as a celebration of local identity rather than a product-led advertiser.
Periscope, a Minneapolis-based advertising agency, created the campaign. Committee Films handled production, and editorial was completed internally at Periscope. The campaign was published in May 2017 in the United States market, with all creative rooted in the same geographic and cultural context as the Minnesota State Lottery audience it addressed.
Gnomes connect to the Scandinavian heritage that defines much of Minnesota's cultural identity. Periscope used them to give the campaign a distinctive character voice that feels regionally authentic rather than generically whimsical. The gnomes function as cultural representatives of Minnesota's hidden and not-so-hidden treasures, per the campaign's stated creative premise.
'Uff Da' is a Norwegian-American exclamation widely used in Minnesota as an expression of mild surprise or exasperation. In the context of the campaign, it serves as a cultural marker identifying the lottery's audience as specifically Minnesotan, reinforcing the broader #OnlyinMN strategy of celebrating local vernacular, traditions, and community rituals unique to the state.
The Clapboard Score for 'Uff Da and Lefse, Meat Raffle, Gnome Town' is 63 out of 100. The score reflects genuine creative craft and a clear cultural strategy within the constraints of the United States gambling category, while accounting for the absence of publicly documented performance metrics or major industry award recognitions for the campaign.
The campaign represents part of Periscope's tenure on the Minnesota State Lottery account. According to Startribune.com, the account previously moved from Colle+McVoy to Olson in 2010. Periscope followed with a cultural identity approach in 2017, which evolved into the 'I'MN' brand platform later that same year, suggesting the gnome campaign helped establish a durable creative direction.
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