Quick answer: The New York Lottery’s Can You Imagine? platform turns the simple act of buying a lottery ticket into a colorful invitation to dream bigger, using surreal creative, contextual OOH, retail displays, subway takeovers, and street-level activations across New York.
A Brand Platform Built Around Imagination
The New York Lottery has launched Can You Imagine?, its first major brand campaign in nearly a decade.
Created by McCann New York, the new platform asks players to imagine their wildest dreams: the fantastical, personal, funny, extravagant, and unexpected scenarios that could become possible with the cash from a big win.
The campaign unifies every game, touchpoint, and expression of the brand under one positioning: The New York Lottery Keeps New Yorkers Dreaming Bigger.
From Individual Games to One Emotional Brand Idea
For years, the New York Lottery marketed many of its games independently, without one clear tagline or emotional idea connecting them.
With Can You Imagine?, the brand now has a larger role in people’s lives. It is not only about jackpots or tickets. It is about the instant moment of possibility that begins when someone imagines what they would do if they won.
That insight is especially powerful in New York, a state defined by ambition, big dreams, reinvention, and people chasing lives that feel larger than ordinary.
Everyday Places Transformed Into Dream Worlds
The campaign launched with two 30-second films directed by Los Pérez through Biscuit Filmworks.
For the production, the team built full-scale versions of a New York bodega and a gas station inside a studio in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
These everyday environments became elaborate canvases for imagination, reinforcing the idea that extraordinary dreams often begin in ordinary places.
The creative keeps the world recognizable while pushing it into surreal, cinematic territory. That balance allows the campaign to feel imaginative without losing its New York authenticity.
A Colorful New Visual Identity
The new platform also introduces a fresh, colorful design language for the New York Lottery, including a redesigned logo.
At the center of the identity is a new 90-degree “lottoscape” symbol inspired by the perspective-shifting power of imagination.
Through rotating imagery and unexpected visual juxtapositions, the design makes the world feel as if it is tipping into possibility — a strong visual metaphor for the feeling of dreaming about a win.
OOH That Brings the Dream Into the City
The campaign extends across a wide brand ecosystem, including billboards, subway takeovers, digital banners, social posts, retail displays, and point-of-sale materials in more than 13,000 locations statewide.
Its OOH presence is especially important because the idea is built for public imagination. The campaign meets New Yorkers in the same places where lottery tickets are bought, commutes happen, and daily routines unfold.
By placing surreal dream scenarios into real city environments, the brand turns familiar streets, stores, stations, and retail moments into prompts for a simple question: what would you do if you won?
Surreal Dreams With a New York Attitude
The campaign imagery mixes extravagant aspiration with smaller, more personal fantasies.
Some dreams are big and cinematic, while others are delightfully specific — from buying a helicopter to do grocery runs to filling an entire refrigerator with artisanal cheese.
This range is what makes the platform flexible. It does not define winning in only one way. Instead, it gives every player room to imagine a dream that feels personal to them.
Street-Level Activations Add Real-World Impact
To bring the platform deeper into the everyday lives of New Yorkers, the brand also launched in-person activations, including a luxury car takeover that lined the streets of Manhattan.
These activations were supported by mobile billboards and contextual OOH placed near luxury apartments, high-end hotels, designer stores, and car dealerships.
In those environments, the campaign headlines appeared to interact with the aspirational world directly in front of the viewer, making the creative feel more contextual, playful, and immediate.
Why the Campaign Works
The strength of Can You Imagine? is that it focuses on what happens before someone wins.
One of the most emotional parts of playing the lottery is the moment of possibility: when people start thinking about where they would go, what they would buy, who they would help, and how their life might change.
By building the campaign around that universal feeling, the New York Lottery creates a platform that can work across games, media formats, retail locations, and generations.
What Marketers Can Learn From Can You Imagine?
- A strong brand platform can unify multiple products under one emotional idea.
- OOH works best when it connects with the physical and cultural context around the viewer.
- Everyday locations can become powerful creative canvases when the idea is clear.
- Surreal imagery feels stronger when it is grounded in a relatable human insight.
- Brand identity, retail, social, film, and OOH should feel like one connected ecosystem.
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