If you’ve been in your local newsagents recently, or watching TV (in between the wall-to-wall TV coverage of the Royal Wedding) then there’s a good chance you’ve seen the National Lottery’s latest Bingo themed scratchcard instant game.
Now, if you’ve been following the ins and outs of bingo news the last few years, you might recall that the National Lottery has had a bit of a thing against the UK’s retail bingo industry. Back in 2008, the National Lottery launched its Flamin’ Hot Bingo game, with an advert that seemed to all to be poking fun at the land based bingo industry, showing a dowdy old woman on a mobility scooter pulling up to her local bingo hall to find herself locked out, the club showing a large closed sign.
The Bingo Association rightly took exception to this portrayal and lodged a complaint with the Advertising Standards Authority. The complaint was upheld and the National Lottery were told not to run the advert again. You can read the full complaint and adjudication here. The advert was stopped, and the game disappeared not long after, but the event showed the Lottery held one of its nearest retail competitors in contempt.
With the release of this new Bingo game, it would seem the once more, the National Lottery would like to thumb a great big raspberry at the UK’s retail bingo industry. Why’s that? Well look at the card and tell me what you see? Is it the traditional UK bingo ticket? Is it heck!
For some reason, the National Lottery has seen fit to go with the US style 75 ball bingo ticket – a ticket completely alien to anyone who regularly plays bingo in a UK bingo club. I can only surmise that UK bingo is not worthy of its own scratchcard, in the eyes of the National Lottery. Instead, they’d rather big up the US version of the game.
Surely it’s a bit of an own goal, with UK bingo players being so familiar with their own 90 ball game, they’d be more likely to appreciate the Bingo Scratchcard on offer if it had featured the version they were familiar with? We’ve seen this in the past, where industries not familiar with the minutiae of the UK’s ever popular retail game offer the wrong version to UK players, and it would seem that the National Lottery is the latest in a line of people doing just that.
Either the lottery people who designed the card didn’t know that this is US bingo or did it to deliberately snub the UK’s hundreds of bingo halls and hundreds of thousands of regular bingo players. That my opinion anyway. Shame on you National Lottery – how about bringing out a 90 ball scratchcard? Loads of us would love that…
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