Powerball Arrives In The UK, Bringing New Cross-Continental Concerns About Jackpot Fatigue

“Promotions may win quarters, innovation wins decades.”

— Bob McDonald, chairman, president, and CEO of Procter and Gamble

Whether it is with Lotto Max, EuroJackpot, SuperEnaLotto, EuroMillions, Mega Millions, Powerball, Mega Da Virada, or El Gordo, nothing quite inspires “What if?” ruminations like a huge jackpot from your lottery. After all, who doesn’t want to be a millionaire?

A slim chance to win a life-changing amount of money for the price of a small, light-hearted flutter is a winning concept that’s stood the test of time. When it gets right down to the nitty of the gritty, such draw games are just clever math, packaged into this compelling consumer proposition. For the construct of a rolling jackpot game to work, it depends on lots of people, each spending small amounts of money, to generate a shared prize fund, from which only a lucky few will ever win the top prize. Within a considered, well-defined portfolio of distinct and differentiated game propositions, big jackpots fully deliver on the life-changing USP (unique selling proposition) of the lottery category.

To this day, in the face of expanding competition from sports betting, fantasy sports, and prize draws offerings from the likes of Omaze, on paper at least, big jackpot games provide the opportunity platform for lotteries to stand out in a way the competition can’t match. This is because lottery format games — liquidity based or insured — are the only ones that can offer the scale of such vast top prizes. These big jackpot games, whether perennial or seasonal ones, are quite literally the stuff that dreams are made of. And dreams are what lotteries sell, giving lottery the potential for near universal appeal. 

With huge jackpots, reason and logic take a back seat. Hope and dreams are on sale, and the allure intensifies with every additional ticket sold as it helps the jackpot grow until won. Yes, these games are a moonshot, but players know they are unlikely to win the big one — it goes with the territory, only a lucky few do among from millions. However, players also know they must be in it to win it, and maybe, just maybe, hey, you never know, it could be you …

While the tickets don’t quite sell themselves, money does talk. Such jackpots certainly catch the eye and imagination, generating organic media amplification and word of mouth that helps the lottery gain mental availability with consumers who may typically be missed by their marketing efforts. Once more, “What would you do?” type conversations are had, FOMO builds, co-workers and families pool their cash into impromptu syndicates, and impulse purchases are made. This collective buzz is a powerful sales engine, and it helps the lottery drive incremental sales among regular, disengaged, infrequent, and lapsed players alike.

Sometimes, the jackpots are even big enough to cut through and entice those who ply their trade on Manhattan’s Wall Street, Tokyo’s Kabutochō, or London’s the Square Mile to part with some of their wads of cash — all on a product that, unlike other consumer goods, has no inherent limit on a weekly spend (within responsible play frameworks, of course). Unlike the limited demand for everyday products like coffee, cola, or laundry detergent — where you can only drink so much coffee/cola or need to do so many washes — lottery sales are highly responsive to compelling advertising.

It is therefore no surprise that over the past two decades, the lottery industry has steadily increased the frequency of massive jackpots offered to consumers. Across Canada, Lotto Max was launched in 2009 and a second draw day was added in 2019. There was the cross-sell initiative in the U.S. for states to sell both Powerball and Mega Millions in 2010. A second draw day was added to EuroMillions in 2011, six years after the U.K. launch campaign leveraged a “Robinson Crusoe” construct to tell players there was “something different about Friday.” Eurojackpot was launched in 2012 and went to a second draw day in 2022. Powerball in the U.S. added a third weekly draw on a Monday in 2021.

Extra draw days often arrive with matrix adjustments, and sometimes with “price increases” (in the eyes of players) or “price enhancements” (in the eyes of lottery marketeers), with the theory, and goal, being to deliver faster jackpot growth and thus greater sales. Results have varied, but one thing has been consistent: The changes have delivered ever bigger jackpots.

The latest big jackpot news is that beginning this Tuesday, U.K. players will have a shot at winning Powerball jackpots from the U.S. (Arguably, since 2013 they already could, via Lottoland’s offering of taking bets on the outcome of the Powerball draws, but that is a topic for another day.)

The effort to make this happen, the complexity and number of stakeholders involved, should not be underestimated. The folks at Allwyn UK (operator of the UK National Lottery 4th license) and the Multi-State Lottery Association (the nonprofit organization that runs Powerball across 48 U.S. lotteries) will have moved mountains to bring this about. 

Short term vs. long term

The ambition is undoubtedly bold. Powerball’s international expansion promises larger jackpots for both U.K. and U.S. consumers. In the U.K., the game will debut alongside Lotto and EuroMillions. This expands the National Lottery’s lineup to a record number of million-pound jackpots available, giving players the chance to win with seven weekly draws in which they can chase a rolling jackpot prize.

On the surface, this expansion seems positive. Powerball’s super-sized jackpots will undoubtedly reignite temporary waves of “lotto fever” in the U.K. However, the expansion raises a critical structural concern: Is it possible to introduce too many draws and have jackpots that are simply too big for the category’s long-term health?

Some will argue “the bigger, the better” and “the more the merrier,” but the systemic consequences for the category warrant careful consideration. They are ones that go far beyond the omnipresent risk of sales cannibalization whenever a new game is introduced. The reality is more nuanced, exposing a deeper, more fundamental issue that can be summed up as “jackpot fatigue.”

Big jackpots are slowly but surely losing their FOMO. In the U.K., £10 million jackpots used to be a big thing, but these days not so much. The expanded game matrices introduced to allow the top prize to reach astronomical heights also make them incredibly difficult to win, which is fracturing player win belief. Furthermore, because these massive jackpots are now offered so frequently, they have lost what made them special and become entirely missable — players know there will always be another one in a day or two. These two critical factors have caused games with unbridled jackpot rolls to lose their shine. What were once exciting growth engines for sales have begun to stall.

This is the reality for many lotteries caught in a downward spiral: Each new jackpot record raises the benchmark for mass participation. Consequently, smaller (yet still life-changing) jackpots feel underwhelming. Both consumers and the media have become desensitized, demanding ever-bigger jackpots to generate the exact same level of excitement, attention, and sales that modest jackpots used to guarantee.

Jackpot fatigue is a pervasive issue harming participation and category adoption. In recent years, we have seen two clear examples of this trend in the U.K. and Irish domestic Lotto games, both of which operate on a bi-weekly draw schedule:

• In Ireland, from June 9, 2021 to Jan. 12, 2022, Lotto lasted for a record 63 consecutive draws. 
• In the U.K., between Nov. 18, 2015, and Jan. 9, 2016, Lotto ran for a record 15 consecutive draws. (To put this into perspective, in the U.K. it took almost a decade for the first ever Triple Rollover draw to occur. A Triple Rollover finally occurred on the 880th draw on May 29, 2004, the first draw having taken place on Nov. 19, 1994, back when it was known as The National Lottery game.)

While both these rollover cycles ultimately ended in record-breaking jackpots that supercharged short-term sales, the aftermath told a different story. Once the jackpots reset, both games were impacted in subsequent draws as players immediately voted with their wallets. In response, both operators hurriedly introduced structural game changes and capping mechanisms to ensure such extended cycles could not happen again.

What US trends tell us

Further crucial clues can be gleaned from the U.S., Powerball’s home jurisdiction, where billion-dollar jackpots have been a fixture of the lottery landscape for a decade now.

Ever since Powerball broke the $1 billion jackpot barrier in January 2016, grand prizes of this scale have become a recurring feature. In total, the U.S. lottery market has produced 14 separate occasions where winning jackpots were promoted as billion-dollar annuity prizes. The top prize figures, of course, reflect the annuity value, not the immediate cash payout. In fact, only the $2 billion November 2022 Powerball jackpot came close to reaching $1 billion in immediate cash. But for all intents and purposes, these Mega Millions and Powerball jackpots are marketed as $1 billion-something to consumers.

These billion-dollar jackpots might appear to be a gold mine on the surface, spiking sales in the moment, but a closer look reveals a far more complex reality. For example, out of a possible 104 Mega Millions draws in a recent fiscal year, approximately 25% of the total sales came from just three draws, as the top prize reached and then surpassed $1 billion, each with a successive highest jackpot at the time. This is inherently unhealthy. First, it implies that lottery performance is dictated by the luck-of-a-roll cycle rather than strategic commercial initiatives. Second, it reveals that players see little value in routine, draw-to-draw participation. Ultimately, it shows that while players may still harbor hope and personal dreams, their actual belief that it could be them is rapidly fading.

In such scenarios, when win belief falters, play frequency drops, and the worth of a jackpot prize value gets reappraised, to a point where many players have become entirely numb to starting jackpots. The outcome for many lotteries is that it has become harder and harder to sell a $100 million or $200 million jackpot, let alone a $20 million starting jackpot. So much so, many lotteries don’t even try, and instead they wait until certain tipping-point thresholds are reached before they start promoting, as that’s where they see the ROI. Others have pretty much entirely contracted out their marketing to organic media and social media. While common practice, it does not mean these solutions are best practice.

The threshold “solution” conditions the consumer, like Pavlov’s dogs, to respond to whatever jackpot level the lottery is using as its tipping point. Not only does this create the wrong mindset internally within a lottery, but the problem also goes beyond this, in that if a lottery itself is not excited about their own jackpots, why should the consumer be?

The organic “solution” abandons sales in any given fiscal year to luck and impulse purchase, rather than seeing the game as a potential growth engine.

Neither “solution” addresses jackpot fatigue. In fact, it can be argued that both options only exacerbate the problem, albeit through different mechanisms.

When players vote with their feet and wallets, either dropping out completely or waiting for a new certain jackpot threshold before they play, it inevitably leads to less liquidity in the game. This then creates a vicious circle where jackpot levels grow more slowly, resulting in each game in question ending up being considered less exciting or newsworthy.

To counter this trend, operators can adjust draw frequency, matrix design, and related options around prize tiers and starting jackpots, payouts, or ticket prices, all aspects of game design that can be used to enhance a game — but structural constraints usually limit their options. Consequently, most major game changes across the globe inevitably default to the same three outcomes: raising the ticket price, increasing the starting jackpot, and/or making the jackpot harder to win.

Why play if you don’t feel you can win?

While this reliance on harder odds and higher prices is what delivers the record jackpots, it also pushes the game design past a critical breaking point. By over-expanding the matrix relative to the playing population and increasing the cost of entry, the foundational lottery proposition, “a slim chance at a life-changing win for the price of a light-hearted flutter” is compromised.

Subsequently, a damaging shift occurs in player psychology, as reason and logic begin vying for the driver’s seat of decision-making. Players inevitably reassess the value exchange of what was once a frequent purchase, and as one player once memorably put it in a research group: “I’d rather buy an egg roll than a ticket for [that game].”

Hearing something like this from your core consumer base makes it abundantly clear that there’s a problem to solve — one that is less about any specific jackpot tipping point, because it is more fundamental to why people either come or don’t come into the category in the first place. It is about win belief. 

Huge jackpots retain their appeal; marketed effectively, they evoke emotive transformation, but the astronomical odds used to generate them do not. This disconnect becomes amplified by both perception and experience over time. The one thing the player desires feels both out of their price range and out of reach.

When a product moves from potential universal appeal to losing out to a routine grocery purchase, like an egg roll, it signals a deeper category crisis — one where not only is marketing failing to engage and inspire, but the clever math has ceased to deliver a viable value proposition. As excessively rolling jackpots lose their magic, these games eventually scream to the consumer the top prize is un-winnable.

And if a lottery game is perceived as un-winnable, why would anyone play it?

I have sat behind one-way glass observing focus groups of lottery players, quizzed about their motivations to play, more times than I care to remember over the last 20 years. My observations have spanned from unexpected places like Pine Bluff, Arkansas, to global hubs like Dubai, Dublin, London, Los Angeles, and New York. Not once have I heard a player say their motivation to play is about anything other than the hope of a transformational big win.

While association with a good cause might make playing socially acceptable, and can even make a losing experience a little easier, it is never the reason they enter the category and buy a ticket. Nor is it the reason they remain. But a lack of a winning experience is the core reason people leave the category.

So, what are the implications for Powerball being made available to U.K. lottery players? Based on the current Powerball matrix, the jackpot odds are 1 in 292,201,338. Thus, with three draws per week and a price point of £4 in the U.K., it is unlikely to be adopted into weekly repertoire play, but instead will drive occasional impulse play or periodic jackpot chasing at ever-increasing thresholds.

The introduction of Powerball jackpots to the U.K. will easily surpass the current records set by EuroMillions; soon, Powerball will be the game dictating the record books. It is inevitable that these prizes will reach not just the billion-dollar range, but the billion-pound threshold as well — equivalent to just over $1.3 billion. 

So, while launching another rolling jackpot game may feel like an easy, quick win, the tailor-made game design of Powerball in the U.K. perhaps overlooks a lesson in foresight already provided by Lotto Max and EuroMillions. Both these games intentionally cap the top prize tier to prevent runaway jackpots, cleverly redistributing the prize pool to sustain engagement and reduce the chances of players becoming numb to healthy prize levels. But once a lottery unleashes the allure of billion-pound prizes, the genie is out of the bottle, and the consumer psyche is permanently altered. The danger: Win belief is further impacted for more and more players. 

How jackpot fatigue is managed will be vital. The risk, as seen elsewhere, is that the short-term sales spike provided by these colossal rolling jackpots is nothing more than a temporary sugar rush. And just like consuming too much sugar, the long-term impact on the system risks being deeply damaging. Feeding players a steady diet of billion-pound jackpots is effectively the Type 2 diabetes of the lottery industry; by continuously relying on astronomical prizes to spike ticket sales, lotteries risk inducing a permanent “insulin resistance” in the public.

The downward spiral described above will inevitably impact both Lotto and EuroMillions, making nearly all the 364 annual jackpot draws incredibly difficult to promote. Despite each one offering payouts that vastly exceed a lifetime of median U.K. earnings, these regular draws may end up failing to register as much as they currently do with a public desensitized by billion-pound milestones.

To paraphrase the immortal words of The Blow Monkeys, “It doesn’t have to be this way.” The desire to win a life-changing amount of money hasn’t and isn’t going out of fashion anytime soon. So, this is not a question of lottery relevancy or a certain jackpot threshold per se — more one of fluctuating consumer motivation. And because it fluctuates, motivation is also addressable.

Matt Osgood is a marketing professional with a record of successful cooperation with the lottery industry and of growing player participation and accelerating sales. Matt has held senior product and marketing roles in lotteries in Illinois, Ireland, and the U.K., as well as holding director roles at Lottoland and The Football Pools. Elected chair of the EuroMillions marketing working group for three terms, Matt has also consulted for lotteries in Arkansas, California, Canada, New York, and the UAE — improving agency/client ways of working and game design innovation, rejuvenating product portfolios, enhancing marketing campaign effectiveness, and fixing jackpot fatigue.