The challenge was to strengthen Scholz & Volkmer’s positioning as a sustainable, socially responsible agency. As we did not have a media budget for the campaign, our aim was to inspire a broader audience with our idea via free PR with a relevant, contemporary idea: an alternative gift shop.

We reached this goal by transforming two major negative trends in Germany into something positive. On the one hand, people consume more and more stuff and, on the other hand, they have less and less time. So we created an online shop called 'time rather than stuff', where – rather than giving friends a third mobile, fifth cooking book or seventh perfume - people could give them the most valuable thing they have – time.

We launched our online shop 'time rather than stuff' on 1 December, at the beginning of the busiest Christmas-shopping period.

The shop provides users with inspiration for alternative 'time-spent-together'presents such as 'cooking together instead of a cooking book', 'going for a walk outdoors in the fresh air instead of perfume', 'visiting the zoo instead purchasing a new pet' and lots more. The users can pick a gift, suggest a date and send it to the recipient. The recipient, in turn, confirms the date and subsequently the 'time gift' is spent together.

To get people talking about the campaign, we implemented a live social stream on the website, so people could comment via Twitter and Facebook and spread the word about our shop.

As hundreds of 'time gifts' were given, we decided to integrate new 'user- generated' gifts. The shop is still online and growing.

Within the first weeks, the campaign was already endorsed by celebrities (e.g. bestselling author Eckard von Hirschhausen), achieved free PR thanks to recommendations in the press (e.g. germanies biggest news website Spiegel Online) and from national and international organisations (e.g. Greenpeace).

We received thousands of tweets and posts via integrated social media channels filled with praise and suggestions for new gifts. Within one month of its launch, the website registered a total of 129,949 visits and 5,064 time gifts were given.