Even when the state’s new spending of lottery proceeds are highlighted in advertising campaigns, this has not exactly sending tickets flying off the shelves, auditors say. National lottery

Ticket sales increased 4 percent last year – to more than $510 million, a bit shy of their 2008 peak. But the increase is actually because of the changes in jackpots and the economic conditions, says a draft report from the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Committee. Lottery numbers

Legislative auditors are clearly unhappy with lawmakers’ decision in 2010 of spending the biggest chunk of lottery proceeds on college scholarships and grants, followed by preschool programs for the poor.

On previous years, the money was spent on school construction. State Sen. Jim Kastama was in favour of the shift to higher education because he said that this would help sell even more tickets.

“However, it does not appear that the change in beneficiary was responsible for this increase,” auditors said of the $19 million increase in sales.

Kastama didn’t dispute that higher sales haven’t occurred, but instead blamed the lottery’s marketing.

The lottery spent $2.3 million last year, only a little more than a quarter of its advertising budget, to focus on the new benefits for college students and preschoolers. Otherwise, much of the advertising focused on the prizes and the benefits of winning them.

Kastama, who patterned the funding scheme after Georgia’s, said Washington should also do the same as Georgia with an advertising campaign “built around education, not get-rich-quick schemes.”

“What we need to take from this is that we haven’t done everything we can. The takeaway isn’t that the program doesn’t work.” Kastama said in a statement.

Auditors said they could find no statistical connection between advertising and increased sales.

The state spent $12.1 million last year on an advertising contract with Cole & Weber United, and auditors said they didn’t see results – except in one case involving the introduction of Powerball, in which they said that sales increase was actually less than the money spent on ads.

Lottery spokesman Arlen Harris said advertising is in general “a big question mark for anybody in sales,” not just the lottery.

“Coming up in six weeks we have the Super Bowl. And Pepsi and Coke and Budweiser and Doritos are all going to be spending millions and millions of dollars on advertising. They don’t know that the purchase of those ads drive sales of their products or not,” he said.

The lottery says their advertising was limited in structure for its former mission of funding school’s construction because school districts worried that voters would get the wrong message: districts flush with lottery cash didn’t really need those local levies.

It’s helpful to be able to advertise the new mission to fund college education, Harris said. And if it’s not paying off yet it might be because word of the year-and-a-half-old change just needs more time to circulate.

And just to prove a point, only 6 percent of lottery players who were surveyed last year could name higher education as the new beneficiary of the lottery, even when a third of those said that funding might affect their decisions to buy tickets.