Welcome to New Baconshire: A Bacon-Scented Campaign for the NH Lottery

By Maura McCann, Director of Marketing, New Hampshire Lottery, and Erika Gammon, Account Director, GYK

Published December 16, 2025

The New Hampshire Lottery wanted to create a launch campaign worthy of one of the most unique and fun products in its history: the $2 I ❤️ Bacon scratch-and-sniff ticket. In partnership with creative agency GYK, the team needed to deliver a campaign big enough — and weird enough, yes weird enough — to match the novelty of a bacon-scented lottery ticket.  

The mission was twofold:

1. Spark statewide buzz and engagement through a fully integrated, culturally irresistible idea that would resonate across New Hampshire and appeal to residents’ sense of humor and local pride.

2. Drive awareness and sales by helping the product stand out among many other scratch ticket options and lottery products.

   
   

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Insight and Big Idea

New Hampshire has a ton of towns and counties with “ham” in the name – Durham, Hampton Beach, Windham, Nottingham, Rockingham County — the list goes on. There’s even ham in the state’s own name!

And if there’s one universal truth we were sure of, it’s that everyone loves bacon more than ham. So, the team wanted to help New Hampshire ditch the HAM, so residents could bring home the BACON with their winnings and the new $2 I ❤️ Bacon ticket.

That’s when we decided to rebrand “New HAMpshire” and instead welcome folks to “New BACONshire,” using a $2 scratch ticket as the inspiration for a full-scale statewide takeover and one of the most ambitious, culturally unhinged campaigns the Lottery had launched in years.

Challenges

Launching a bacon-scented $2 ticket came with inherent challenges. First, the ticket had a lower price point, meaning the campaign needed to move large volumes quickly to hit sales targets. Second, the concept had to balance playful absurdity with official Lottery credibility; rebranding the state, even temporarily, could be perceived as silly if not executed thoughtfully. Finally, the campaign needed to break through both digital and in-retail clutter, earning potential customer attention and leveraging a short launch window to generate maximum engagement across multiple channels.

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Execution

The campaign unfolded in four interconnected phases:

1. AI Teaser Videos – The Conspiracy Phase

The creative team embraced the chaotic humor of AI-generated first-person vlogs to tease the launch. These intentionally strange “slop vlogs” portrayed ham as the enemy of the state and bacon as the hero, creating surreal, algorithm-friendly content that slid naturally into social feeds. The result was immediate: these teasers delivered the Lottery’s highest social engagement of the year.

2. The Governor Makes It Real

Momentum escalated when Governor Kelly Ayotte officially announced the temporary rebrand to New Baconshire, renaming all towns and counties containing “ham”: Hampton Beach became Baconton Beach, Nottingham became Nottingbacon, and Rockingham County became Rockingbacon County. The Governor’s involvement lent credibility to the absurdity, generated press coverage, and helped the surreal social campaign feel like a real, newsworthy event.

3. “Stop and Smell the Bacon” Experiential Activation

On October 11, New Baconshire came to life at the Common Man Roadside rest stops in Hooksett. Tens of thousands of travelers were welcomed into the new state with bacon-scented cannons, branded swag, and bouquets of real bacon paired with $2 I ❤️ Bacon tickets. The activation created hundreds of “New Baconnite” evangelists, all of whom were featured in social content that extended the campaign reach even further.

4. Retail, Paid Media, and Second-Chance Engagement

The campaign extended across digital and traditional channels, including paid social, display, radio, online video, and in-store point-of-sale. Players could enter the Bring Home the Bacon second-chance drawing for a chance to win a year’s supply of bacon from North Country Smokehouse (a local New Hampshire business), driving additional engagement and repeat ticket interaction.

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Results and Conclusions

The campaign delivered both cultural impact and commercial success. The $2 I ❤️ Bacon scratch ticket became the #1-selling $2 ticket in the state during the week ending November 1, 2025, moving 24,000 tickets that week alone and surpassing fierce holiday competitors like the Hunted Hundreds scratch ticket. As of early November, more than 150,000 tickets had been sold, putting the campaign on pace to match or exceed the goal of a sell-out timeline of 15 weeks.

Digital engagement was equally impressive, with over 60,000 social views across paid and organic channels at a cost per view of just $0.01, and the AI teaser videos delivering the Lottery’s highest social engagement of the year. The Governor’s participation, combined with the in-person Hooksett activation, created additional earned media and real-world buzz, ensuring that both ticket sales and brand awareness surged simultaneously.

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Welcome to New Baconshire proved that bold, playful creativity can drive measurable business results. By leaning into the absurd, the New Hampshire Lottery and GYK created a campaign that captured the public imagination, engaged tens of thousands of residents and travelers, and turned a $2 scratch ticket into a cultural phenomenon. The campaign not only “brought home the bacon” in a literal sense but also demonstrated how imaginative marketing can translate into real-world impact.