Powerball's 'Tittle' Characters Get Creative Refresh With McCann New Zealand

Two yellow dots sitting atop the word "Million" have quietly become one of New Zealand's most recognizable advertising characters. They have names, personalities, and a job: to remind Kiwis each week that imagination could change everything. This week, those characters got a makeover.

Powerball's "tittles"—the technical term for the dots above a lowercase i, repurposed here as playful mascots—first appeared in 2019. By 2022, they had evolved into full three-dimensional figures with limbs, faces, and distinct ways of moving through the world. They became shorthand for the lottery's core pitch: the everyday fantasy of what might be possible. Now, working with animation studio Flux, McCann New Zealand has given them another refresh, one that deepens their expressiveness and opens up richer storytelling possibilities.

The new versions carry more detail in how they move and interact. Their faces register more emotion. The scenarios they inhabit are more imaginative and layered. But the technical work behind the refresh may matter just as much as what appears on screen. McCann has built what it calls Content at Scale—a system that takes creative assets and adapts them efficiently across television, social media, digital platforms, out-of-home advertising, radio, direct mail, and in-store displays. The goal is consistency without repetition, flexibility without losing craft. Each channel gets a version tailored to its audience and format, but all of it speaks in the same visual language.

Leah Neilson, the Chief Marketing Officer at Lotto New Zealand, framed the refresh as an evolution of something already working. Powerball, along with Lotto and Strike, drives the majority of the organization's revenue. The tittles have become woven into how New Zealanders think about the brand. The risk in refreshing them was losing that recognition. The opportunity was keeping them relevant as media fragmented and audience attention scattered across more channels than ever. "The campaign is about imagining what could be possible," Neilson said, "and this evolution gives us more ways to bring that idea to life."

Sarah Shepherd, McCann's Creative Director, described the new work as giving the characters more room to play. The scenarios are broader. The storytelling is more ambitious. The characters themselves feel more alive—not just mascots performing a function, but figures with agency and personality. Andrew Jackson, McCann's Technical Director, emphasized the marriage of human creativity and technology. The Content at Scale system isn't meant to automate away the craft; it's meant to amplify it, allowing a single creative idea to reach more people without diluting its quality or losing the human touch that made it work in the first place.

The campaign launched this week alongside Powerball's latest game changes, rolling out across the full spectrum of channels where Lotto reaches its audience. For a lottery operator, the stakes of advertising are straightforward: participation drives revenue, and revenue funds the public good projects that lotteries support. But there's something else at work in how the tittles function. They've become a cultural artifact, a small yellow reminder that ordinary people can imagine extraordinary things. The refresh keeps that idea alive, just with better animation and smarter distribution.