We decided to target the 10% of advertising people who use an adblocker. Because the people who hate traditional banner ads and prerolls, might be more motivated to create a different kind of campaign.

So we created a banner that was only visible to adblock users, on the 3 major Belgian advertising websites: mm.be, pub.be and bloovi.be.

We installed a plugin on each of these websites. It detected adblock users and showed them a special message: “you block ads even if you work in advertising? Then maybe you’re the person we’re looking for.”

Our plugin was integrated into the code of the 3 websites and made our banner a part of the site, so adblockers didn’t recognize it as an ad. Only adblock users saw our banner in the (usually empty) space where normally there would be a traditional banner ad. This was done in full cooperation with the websites.

IMPLEMENTATION

Our plugin was integrated into the code of the 3 websites and made our banner a part of the site, so adblockers didn’t recognize it as an ad. Only adblock users saw our banner in the (usually empty) space where normally there would be a traditional banner ad. This was done in full cooperation with mm, pub and bloovi.

TIMELINE

The banners ran for one month, from 26/11/2015 until 26/12/2015.

PLACEMENT

The banners ran on the 3 major Belgian advertising websites, visited almost exclusively by people active in the Belgian advertising industry.

SCALE

The total size of the Belgian advertising industry: about 20 000 people.

The 3 websites we advertised on reach the total population. Our banner reached 10% of them.

BUSINESS IMPACT

- We received more than 60 applications from 16 countries during the campaign (1 month). That's four times the usual number.

- We had only 4 open positions, but so far we hired 6 new people: 2 strategists, 1 UX designer, 1 creative team, 1 account Mgr, 1 account executive.

RESPONSE

- Because our banner wasn't uploaded via ad servers, but instead integrated into the website's code, we couldn't measure the Click Through Rate. But we do know:

1) Our banner was displayed about 16 900 times in 1 month (10% of the 3 site's total reach)

2) Traffic on our website tripled to about 3000 unique visitors per week during the campaign.

ATTENTION

- Our campaign got major attention from sites like Adweek, generating

+3 000 000 twitter impressions.

- As a result of this campaign our CEO was invited by google to be part of a panel on adblocking.