Koning TOTO

Koning Toto taps into popular culture and becomes fuel for social conversations. Using hip-hop-meets-football culture as a canvas, Toto manages to move from dad’s world to the world of millennials and their friends, without scaring the dads off.

The worlds of football and hip hop go hand in hand. Former football players go into hip hop, current players listen to it and male millennials love both. Facebook analysis showed that people who like one, often also like the other. Especially people in our target audience: men between 24 and 30 years old. Our commercial with an ex-football player who is currently a hip hop artist – Royston Drenthe – set in a football stadium with rap lyrics about sports betting, hits the bulls eye. And to make sure Toto wouldn’t offset the loyal older players, cameos by Johan Derksen and Foppe de Haan added just enough old school wisdom to keep them entertained as well. With this perfect combination we moved Toto from locker room jokes to Internet LOLs, from football-knowledge to street culture and from your dad’s world to the world of you and your friends.

Case Argumentation

We needed to make Toto social and fun: part of millennial culture. What if Toto could fuel social conversation between millennials? What if Toto could fuel male friendships? To achieve these goals, we devised a concept that makes playing Toto a catalyst for bragging and boasting: Koning Toto. Koning Toto conveys that it’s not about your knowledge of sports or betting, but about whether you know better than your friends! Koning Toto symbolizes the timeless ‘bragging and boasting’ men do amongst each other, no matter their age. We played into this innate urge for men to compete amongst each other by challenging them to play and become Koning Toto.

In tone and style we went for a cross over between football and hip hop: two overlapping and popular domains for millennials. Former football players go into hip hop, current players listen to it and Facebook analysis showed that our audience loves both. Our campaign with ex-football player turned hip hop artist Royston Drenthe and his heir to the throne hip hop artist Donnie, set in a football stadium with rap lyrics about sports betting, hits the bulls eye. To make sure Toto wouldn’t offset the loyal older players, cameos by Johan Derksen, Foppe de Haan and Jan Boskamp added just enough old school wisdom to keep them entertained as well. With this perfect combination we moved Toto from locker room jokes to Internet LOLs, from football-knowledge to millennials culture and from your dad’s world to the world of you and your friends.

Film/Integrated

Sports betting seems to be complex. A rather obscure game for those in the know, that you play on your own. We needed to make Toto social and fun again. We needed to convey that it’s not about your knowledge of sports or betting, but about whether you know better than your friends! Because that makes you Koning Toto. In tone and style we went for a cross over between football and hiphop: two overlapping and popular domains in our target audience. Koning Toto Royston Drenthe (football player turned rapper) drops lyrics about his betting skills and speaks the language our audience understands, while golden oldies Johan Derksen and Foppe de Haan keep the older Toto players entertained. And the sea gulls? They are there to add a little weirdness, because that’s what the kids love nowadays. The commercial looks like a music video, sounds like a hip hop song but brings the message across like a commercial should: Do you know better? Play Toto and become KoningToto.

Strategy

Before we set out on our creative journey, we took a detailed look at the worlds of sports betting and (online) gambling. We noted that the competition in these categories focusses exclusively on either the excitement of winning money, or on the skills involved when playing the game. The competition reduced playing to a solitary experience based on individual skill. And Toto wasn’t much different: a rather obscure game for those in the know, that you play on your own. The convention around sports betting was clear: it’s about individuality, stats and knowledge.

But when we took a closer look at the audience, we saw that for players of skill games like Toto, not only money and excitement, but also socialization was a major motivation. From social media data, we learned that Toto was a game highly discussed between friends online. We identified this as a key feature of value for the brand: the role of bringing friends together over sports.

To our analysis of the competition and audience, we added a cultural scan and identified a key cultural element between bros: playful competition. Bragging & boasting between friends is universal, timeless and ageless: from playing FIFA on your console against your friends, to online rap battles; men love to brag & boast. We took this social insight and infused it with a shot of 21st century culture that goes hand in hand with football: hiphop. This lay the foundation for our disruptive idea.

Toto is the only legal sports betting brand in the Netherlands. There’s a group of loyal players that loves to ‘play a Toto’tje’ regularly, but this group is aging. And even though football as a sport is still very popular amongst millennials, they see Toto as their dad’s brand; it doesn’t fit in their world. They would rather get their thrills playing FIFA, online poker games or at an illegal sports betting brand like Unibet. Which poses another big problem for Toto, as in 2019 the online market for betting is set to be deregulated in the Netherlands, meaning considerable foreign competition from international brands like Unibet will be threatening Toto’s position. The brief was to attract new, younger players to the brand.

Our interpretation of the brief was a bit more ambitious. If we wanted to attract a younger audience, we needed to become part of their culture. If we wanted to truly connect with a fresh generation of millennial players, we needed to compete for their attention with the stuff they love to watch, share and talk about. Advertising is generally not part of that stuff. We set out on a quest for a place in millennial culture. The difficulty however was that we needed to do this without scaring off the older loyal Toto players.

Jury feedback

FILM / SILVER

You can feel the creators had fun creating this campaign, something that’s much needed in the modern day advertising landscape. It’s just great advertising.

INTEGRATED / BRONZE

The level of fun and boldness innovates the lottery-market and touches culture on many levels to a stage that the theme was even chanted in football stadiums.