Adblock Recruiting

Background

Belgian advertising agency Boondoggle was looking for fresh talent. People who wanted to create a new kind of advertising, rather than making traditional (albeit online) ads.

To find people who see the future of advertising as being in creating innovative ideas that are actually useful rather than just bombing target audiences with witless messages, Boondoogle reached out to those advertising professionals who had downloaded adblocking software.

Idea

Everyone hated online ads. About 200 million people around the world used adblockers of one sort or another. Even advertising people used adblockers. In Belgium, about 10% of the advertising community used adblockers.

These were the people Boondoggle wanted to attract, creatives who knew there was a better way to reach people online than with ads.

So, it was decided the way to reach them was through a banner but a different kind of banner.

A plugin was installed on the three major Belgian advertising newssites: MM.be, bloovi.be and pub.be. This plugin detected adblock users visiting the site and showed them this special message: "You block ads, even if you work in advertising? Then maybe you're the person we're looking for."

The message was integrated into the code of the websites so adblocking software did not recognise the message as an ad.

Results

Visits to the Boondoggle website job section more than tripled. There were 53 job applications within a matter of weeks, which is a lot more than usual. Six new people joined the team.

Our Thoughts

Don't you just love the irony? You reach people who hate online ads through an online ad?

Here's another irony. Adblockers are already forcing agencies to do better advertising – and this is an instance of it. First of all, people won't block anything that could be useful or fun. Secondly, when you find a way around the problem and reach people with a pertinent targeted message, they will applaud your ingenuity.

And make no mistake, this is ingenious.