The mission of Fairtrade is to make sure that everyone in the international food value chain gets a decent income. By buying Fairtrade label products during the year, you contribute to that goal.

The annual ‘Week of the Fair Trade’ wants to put this way of promoting solidarity in the spotlight. Thus raising immediate awareness and indirectly long-term sales.

Each year Fairtrade uses one insight or theme to bring this message home. This year we started from the fact that 800 million people live under the extreme poverty threshold in the South. Two thirds of those are farmers, earning on average only 67 cents a day.

People in the First World often don’t see this as a major problem, as the injustice is far away from their daily lives. The greater the distance, the smaller the problem becomes. So, our objective was to increase awareness and understanding around this issue.

Fairtrade wants to beat this inverse impact of distance.

The campaign explores in different formats and in different media, what would happen if we here in Belgium only got paid 67 cents a day. And it voiced that in a very personal question: “How long would you work for 67 cents?”.

The campaign strategy was built on four pillars.

The first one was the communication insight: the inverse impact of distance is at the core of the problem and we should tackle it by making it real and bringing it close to the people here.

Another was beating the budget constraint by developing truly integrated work. Integrated through the idea, that is. Not integrated in the sense that everything in all media looks the same.

That same budget constraint made us tap into the goodwill and responsibility of a number of partners, making it a true collaborative campaign.

From the start, we knew the leverage of social media would be a key factor for success. That motivated us to invest both time, effort and goodwill in key pieces of content.

The creative approach 'How long would you work for 67 cents? ' was adapted to the strengths of each medium. In short TVCs and videos we demonstrated the disastrous results of a 67 cents haircut or the impossibility to get a good (or any) bank service for 67 cents.

In print, the absurdity of a 12-word editorial or article became both contentwise and visually clear.

And of course, nothing is as strong as experience. 67 cents worth of cinema (partnership Brightfish) or teaching (partnership KU Leuven) proved to be very unsatisfactory. The social video of a 17 second KU Leuven course (that’s what you get for 67 cents) became the strongest campaign element, generating vast organic reach and engagement.

Our goals were growing awareness of the injustice and make people care about it. As we had no research budget, our KPIs for awareness were online reach and earned media; for making people care we looked at organic reach, engagement and consumer & stakeholder feedback.

Online reach during the campaign period was 130 times the average Fairtrade reach, with 1.365.000. This could not be attributed to media spending as we only spent 1.000€. Earned media generated an estimated reach of 6 million viewers.

Organic reach was two times as important as paid reach. Interestingly, organic reach generated 87% of engagement (a total of 19.292 interactions). Some people and groups made their own executions of the campaign, eg University Hasselt, showing very strong engagement.

Within Fairtrade the campaign became a new benchmark: up to now Austria, Finland, Germany and Switzerland have adopted the campaign.