Digital marketing conference is the largest event for digital marketing professionals in Russia.

The goal was to attract more participants to the conference.

Insight — people are not willing to participate in conferences, as they are simply tired of the same speakers, or so called “local stars” cruising from one conference to another with similar reports for self-promotion.

Challenge — to tell everyone about the unique combination of speakers at DMC.

Idea —

We made a photo shoot and literally gagged all that annoying local speakers. A user could visit the website, choose a speaker he or she was most tired of and see a funny photo of that speaker, bound and gagged. Users could then share these photos on social networks. As a result, we got 900 accredited participants and increase in the amount of ticket sales by 90% compared to the previous year.

The key elements of our PR-campaign were:

• building the reputation of the conference understanding its audience’s needs and adjusting program to them;

• using opinion leaders who are relevant to the audience in an unexpected way, full of self-irony;

• a provocative idea that would draw the attention of the media to the project;

• wide coverage without any expenses on media support due to the viral effect.

1. November 1-7 - we made a photo shoot with all the participants and photo processing, created a special page on the conference website.

2. November 8 - all the participants changed their profile pictures. Their friends and followers literally attacked them with questions.

3. November 10 - the start of the banner campaign and the special webpage of the site. The activity continued till the beginning of the conference.

4. November 10-22 - publications in more than 10 media, which made the audience even more interested in the campaign.

The viral campaign was effective; it gave brilliant PR effect among Russian advertising community and high users’ involvement:

•over 18 k hits on the website and 17 k unique visitors from about 634 cities in 76 countries;

•over 15 k shares and likes on social networks;

•publications in more than 25 popular marketing media.

As a result, without spending a dollar on media buy, DMC 2013 had 900 participants and increase in the amount of ticket sales by 90%.