Don’t Trade Me - Anti Auctions
Paw Justice
Issue 37 | December 2015
Agency
DDB New Zealand
Creative Team
Chief Creative Officer Damon Stapleton Executive Creative Director Shane Bradnick Senior Art Director James Conner Senior Copywriter Christie Cooper Art Director Jian Xin Tay Copywriter Kiran Strickland
Production Team
Digital Designer Jim Pachal Digital Developer Braden Wikohika Sound Design-The Coopers Jon Cooper Digital Project Manager Sheetal Pradhan Digital Project Manager Liz Knox Editors Steve Gulik Mark Tretheway Barnaby Fredric Production Manager Julz Lane Illustrator Toby Morris
Other Credits
Client Craig Dunn Account Director Jenny Travers PR Director - Beat Communications Ange Mace Planner Michiel Cox Senior Account Manager Eleisha Balmer
Date
April 2015
Background
Trade Me was New Zealand's version of eBay. In fact, it was so big that New Zealand didn't even have eBay. 81% of the population used it to sell everything from houses to pets. Thousands of puppies were sold on Trade Me every year, yet the website had no rules about how these puppies should be bred. This had created the perfect selling platforms for puppy mills. Animal rights group, Paw Justice believed that as New Zealand's biggest marketplace for pets, Trade Me needed to lead the way and set regulations to stop puppy mills selling on their site.
Idea
The agency made an advertising campaign to create public awareness and tell Trade Me they needed to set better regulations. Then they used Trade Me against itself, by auctioning the ads on the website in order to raise the money to run them.
Social media and a website directed New Zealanders how to bid on the auctions and where to sign a petition.
A PR partnership with a current affairs TV show led to investigative reports about puppy millers, who were selling on Trade Me. Every ad was sold via the auctions and ran on TV, radio, newspaper and online the next day.
Results
Not only did Paw Justice raise enough money to run the ads but in just two days, after spending only $15,000, the story had appeared in every major media outlet in New Zealand, gaining over one million dollars worth of earned media.
The public rallied behind the cause on social media, creating 16.5 million impressions on Twitter and Facebook (more than four times the population of New Zealand).
Satisfyingly, the day after the campaign launched, Trade Me caved in to public pressure and announced that they would set new rules for anyone selling animals on their site.
Our Thoughts
I love the subversiveness of this idea, the fact that Paw Justice didn't so much talk AT Trade Me as to them through their own platform. It was a simple demonstration of Paw's real claim, in other words 'you guys don't actually know what's going on.'
And it was because the idea was sneakily subversive that it tickled people sufficiently for them to want to bid for the ads and help them run.
This looks like an idea about how auction sites work but, actually, it's a great idea about human nature.