I’m not totally convinced that this is the same but I’ll mention it anyway. I work in a decentralised media team in a non-corporate role for an arms-length public sector organisation that distributes Lottery money raised by ticket purchases where a percentage of each ticket purchase goes to broadly speaking charitable / voluntary / third sector causes.
When I joined the organisation our key messages mandated that we have mention the name of our particular organisation (I should mention for context that we are one of many distributors) in press releases, etc etc and for some bizarre reason we weren’t to say the name of the Lottery game that was the source of our money, allegedly to avoid reader confusion.
Anyway, I perhaps went a little bit rogue but did have the approval of my then-boss who was also the kind of person who didn’t like convention, and I started writing in my comms that the voluntary causes that we were funding were only made possible from the public buying Lottery tickets. I figured that if we’re putting out these stories then making the connection between buying a ticket and giving to a good cause seemed like a better idea than simply mentioning that some faceless organisation was giving out money.
When that first happened Corporate Office did not like that and I got a lovely slap on the wrist from one of their senior managers not to do it again. I carried on, the messages that I added were picked up by the media over time, and eventually became an official key message of the whole organisation.
I would be happy for things to have stopped there, and I’m not suggesting that I’m responsible for the following but the idea of linking ticket purchases to good causes as a key message has permeated into the work that we do in such a fundamental way that in that time multiple distributors, including ourselves, have collectively rebranded to reflect those key messages for a common cause.
Kinda a terrible way of explaining it but hopefully you get the thing that I’m trying to explain (I realise the irony of this in the context of the thread).
Finally I just gotta add that I still work there and that manager does not lol.