The live reply

Background

On April 6, 2017, LDV United, a competing advertising agency in Belgium, openly recruited BBDO account managers on Facebook. By launching a rather peculiar recruitment campaign. They posted 16 pre-written resignation letters on Facebook, for account managers in 16 different agencies. Each letter was written specifically for that agency, addressed at the CEO of the agency and full of inside jokes. Among those letters was a letter for account managers working at BBDO Belgium. It was posted on Facebook, with a daring title: I RESIGN AT BBDO. Account managers could print this letter, sign it and give it to our ceo. A funny campaign. But of course, BBDO wanted to come back immediately with an even better response. And send a message that BBDO is a great place to work. Even better than LDV.

Idea

Rather than silently take the ribbing, the idea was to show exactly how "massive" the response was to LDV's campaign. A few hours after LDV's letter was posted on Facebook, they began broadcasting a live video on the BBDO Facebook page, showing the CEO's desk with a paper tray labeled "Resignation letters for people who want to join LDV." The caption to the video read: "Discover how many resignation letters are flooding in at our CEO's desk." The video proceeded for four hours with nothing happening. Nothing at all—just the sound of crickets. Slow TV at its best.

Results

The livestream generated an organic reach of 87.081 people, 1843 reactions and a 1700 % increase in daily page likes. The video had 26 631 unique viewers. In a small country like Belgium, the advertising and communications industry only consists of about 20 000 people. Our CEO received 0 resignation letters from account managers wanting to go to LDV United.