New York Lottery Year of the horse
Client: McCann New York
Brand: New York Lottery
Type: Branded Content,
Service: Direction, Design, VFX
To celebrate the Lunar New Year 2026, Mayda partnered with McCann NY to create a comedic, surreal campaign for the New York Lottery inspired by the Chinese Idiom “success as soon as the horse arrives”. The film reframes luck as something tangible, arriving unannounced and waiting at the door.
Crafted through a hybrid AI and VFX pipeline, the spot takes a simple cultural insight and shapes it into something distinctly New York: fast, strange and funny. Across the State, unexpected equine visitors are captured via peepholes, doorbell cameras and security footage, inviting audiences to let luck in for the year ahead. Hyper-realistic horses move through everyday environments of suburban porches, apartment hallways and the subway. As the encounters unfold, a New York Lottery ticket appears in the horses’ mouthes acting as a subtle reveal of the source behind the luck.
“This was such a strong concept that probably wouldn’t have survived without leaning into AI pipelines. AI let us prototype fast and flipped the bottleneck from production to ideas and taste. We kept asking ourselves, ‘What’s the funniest, coolest, most absurd version of this?’ – and then we’d make variations and play with them in the edit.”
Ben Smith, ECD & Director, Mayda
Rather than explaining the Chinese idiom directly it is dramatised by leaning into emerging tools. The idea of “the horse arriving” instead becomes a recurring visual gag. The use of AI allowed for rapid exploration of behaviour and variation while traditional VFX anchored each moment physically, ensuring the horse belongs within its environment. The result is a campaign that embraces absurdity with intent and delivers a film that will linger with audiences.
