Takeaways for Leaders
Reach can hide drift; watch the “reset risk” signals early.
If new-user share stays high while repeat interaction softens, you don’t have a marketing problem—you have a system readiness problem. Treat frequency, continuity, and depth of engagement as leadership-grade indicators, not campaign trivia.
Sustained participation requires a persistence layer, not better bursts.
Moments don’t compound. Systems do. Build a stable place where interaction can continue between campaigns—then make it visible wherever attention is earned. That’s how you reduce reset and protect institutional performance over time.
Relevance and seasonality aren’t creative choices; they’re efficiency levers.
Relevance and seasonality aren’t creative choices; they’re efficiency levers.
Cultural recognition can reduce explanation and increase engagement efficiency; seasonal context can prevent the habit loop from restarting when routines change. Leaders win the long game by designing familiarity that travels across channels and calendars.
Overview
How do you spot engagement slipping before the top-line numbers drop?
For most organizations, engagement doesn’t fall off a cliff. It weakens gradually as attention shifts, habits change, and digital expectations rise. For an institution funded by repeat participation, that’s not a marketing inconvenience— it’s a risk to future performance.
Over time, the Oklahoma Lottery saw a pattern leaders should take seriously:
Reach stayed strong: new-user share remained high, signaling continued awareness and discovery.
Repeat interaction softened: sessions per user declined, suggesting returning behavior wasn’t compounding at the same pace.
Then the system began to rebalance: sessions per user rose materially as new-user share moderated—suggesting movement back toward repeat behavior.
None of these signals alone meant “crisis.” Together, they raised a leadership-level question:
Can participation stay familiar and repeatable, without having to reintroduce it every time attention shifts?
That’s the context for Saxum’s work with the Oklahoma Lottery: not chasing short-term spikes, but building a system that sustains participation.
The Context
The Distinction Leaders Can Miss: Reach Can Hide Drift
A system can look fine because it’s still attracting new people, even while repeat engagement quietly erodes.
Broadening = more people encountering the Lottery (awareness growth).
Compounding = people returning more often because the experience is easy, familiar, and worth repeating.
Compounding matters because it’s what keeps performance stable when campaigns stop. The real risk isn’t reach, it’s reset, when every new activation has to rebuild attention and rebuild the habit from scratch.
The Context
The Distinction Leaders Can Miss: Reach Can Hide Drift
A system can look fine because it’s still attracting new people, even while repeat engagement quietly erodes.
Broadening = more people encountering the Lottery (awareness growth).
Compounding = people returning more often because the experience is easy, familiar, and worth repeating.
Compounding matters because it’s what keeps performance stable when campaigns stop. The real risk isn’t reach, it’s reset, when every new activation has to rebuild attention and rebuild the habit from scratch.
“Lottery marketing lives under a microscope; every decision has to hold up. Saxum helped us align more quickly, sharpen our message, and build a campaign system with impact. The work wasn’t just creative; it was controlled, measurable momentum.”
Abby Morgan
Director of Marketing & Product Development
Oklahoma Lottery
The Strategic Pivot
Restraint as Strategy
Before describing what was built, it’s worth naming what was intentionally avoided, because restraint was part of the strategy.
This work did not optimize for:
- Short-term spikes as the primary objective
- Last-click attribution stories the data couldn’t honestly defend
- Urgency, instruction, or promotional pressure designed to force behavior
Saxum, serving as the Lottery’s strategic consultancy and transformation partner, helped leadership anchor decisions in observable, defensible patterns across lottery programs:
- Depth of engagement
- Repeat interaction
- Continuity between moments
- Performance against agreed benchmarks, without manufacturing certainty
The goal wasn’t perfect measurement so much as it was meaningful measurement. It was really about a durable, coherent participation system.
Four Moves That Kept the System Coherent
Leadership aligned around four rules that kept the work coherent across years, channels, and reporting windows.
Move 1
Earn attention before asking for behavior.
Move 2
Normalize low-friction digital interaction
Move 3
Treat cultural relevance as a measurable performance lever.
Move 4
Use seasonal context to prevent engagement from resetting between windows.
Move 1 - Oklahoma Lottery State of Play Campaign
Earn Modern Attention Without Forcing Behavior
Overview
The question wasn’t “How do we drive a spike?” It was:
Can we earn modern attention repeatedly without asking people to change how they already participate?
The State of Play Campaign was built as a conditioning effort: creative designed to feel like entertainment rather than instruction, grounded in Oklahoma places, culture, and everyday moments. The work aimed to earn attention without demanding action.
That intent shaped the execution:
- Media emphasized predictable cadence and repeat exposure rather than short bursts.
- Creative prioritized multiple low-friction entry points into the brand.
- Creator partnerships and physical artifacts were treated as portable touchpoints—meant to be encountered, reused, and re-encountered.
Results
- High eight-figure impressions delivered across digital, broadcast, and added-value DOOH placements.
- CTR ran 60% above the benchmark for online gaming/entertainment.
- Five-figure click volume across the flight, showing voluntary interaction without a hard call to action.
- 96 creator posts and 4.1M+ influencer impressions, extending the campaign into repeatable, shareable contexts.
What it proved: the Lottery could earn attention without pressure.
Next problem: where does engagement go when the campaign ends?
“State of Play” Broadcast Spot
Move 2 - Oklahoma Lottery Players Club Programming
Build a Persistence Layer So Engagement Doesn’t Reset
Overview
When nothing is being promoted, where does interaction go?
Engagement often appears during high-visibility moments, then dissipates when the moment ends. When interaction depends on spikes, every campaign has to restart the system: re-earn attention, re-establish context, re-invite behavior.
The alternative is continuity.
Players Club, Oklahoma Lottery’s loyalty program, has already existed for some time. The question was whether it could carry more weight as a persistence layer; visible, available, and easy to return to, so interaction could continue without being re-triggered.
Saxum helped reposition Players Club inside the engagement system rather than around it:
- Creative emphasized clarity and utility rather than urgency
- Media ensured Players Club was present wherever attention was already being earned
- Flights were structured to test whether interaction extended beyond existing members—observing whether behavior persisted without repeated prompting
Results
- Players Club page views increased 3×.
- Active users increased nearly 4× (expansion beyond a narrow cohort, not just recirculation).
- Views per active user increased year-over-year, showing frequency held as scale increased.
- Once tracking matured, owned-to–app store movement increased materially, making downstream intent more observable.
What it proved: continuity reduces the “start over” problem.
Next lever: efficiency; making engagement easier to earn once continuity exists.
Move 3 - Oklahoma Lottery Lotería
Use Cultural Fluency to Increase Engagement Efficiency
Overview
When the structure of an interaction is already understood, how much more efficiently does it perform?
Lotería (a traditional Mexican bingo-style card game) brought a familiar format with built-in rules, visuals, and social context. Because people already understood how it worked, the experience needed less explanation—and engagement happened with less friction. The mechanics didn’t change. The difference was how quickly the experience made sense.
Results
- Creator-led, bilingual Lotería executions delivered nearly 4× the engagement rate of standard executions.
- The lift occurred without meaningful shifts in mix, mechanics, or calls to action.
What it proved
Cultural recognition is not decoration. It can function as a measurable performance lever,especially when the system already supports return behavior.
Oklahoma Lottery Lotería Influencer & UGC
Move 4 - Oklahoma Lottery Seasonal Programming
Use Seasons to Prevent Resets
Overview
Seasonal shifts change routines, attention, and what “feels relevant.” If participation only shows up in peak moments, the system has to restart each quarter. Seasonal programming treated the calendar as an operating tool, so familiarity carried forward and return behavior didn’t need re-explaining.
Seasonal continuity design included:
Anticipation, not reaction: spring cues established early so summer/fall didn’t start from zero.
Carryover creative equity: recognizable formats, language, and visual cues persisted across flights.
A consistent return path: Players Club and owned destinations remained present between bursts.
Sequenced pressure: lighter conditioning → clearer invitation, instead of immediate “ask.”
Results
What it proved
A calendar can be designed to reduce volatility: when cues and return paths persist, participation reappears faster, with less paid force and less re-teaching.
Insight
The point isn’t one hero metric.
One metric can be misleading. What matters is whether the system is working across the whole path. Over time, the Lottery continued to bring in new people, repeat engagement dipped and then improved, and improved tracking made it easier to see movement into owned channels and toward the app. That combination suggests the participation system was getting stronger, not just one campaign performing well.
Implications
Participation weakens quietly, then shows up in performance later.
Leaders manage drift by building a system that makes returning easy, even when attention shifts.
Make participation repeatable before you need urgency
If engagement only shows up during big moments, the system is fragile.Give people a dependable place to return
A clear “home base” keeps engagement alive between campaigns.Use familiar formats to reduce explanation
When people recognize the structure, response comes faster with less persuasion.Plan for seasons so you don’t restart every quarter
Carry recognizable cues across the calendar so momentum doesn’t reset.
The long game isn’t patience. It’s discipline: invest in continuity, not just peaks, and measure what leadership can confidently stand behind.