We created a luxury pop-up store for the Palessi brand and invited influencers to attend the exclusive launch event. The creative idea centered entirely around this pop-up experience and its ability to fool the influencers into thinking Palessi was in fact an ultra high-end Italian shoe brand. We credit much of the idea’s enormous success to the execution of the pop-up and its ability to create a brand experience that felt authentically exclusive.

Situation

As a budget shoe retailer from Middle America, Payless had stigmatized by fashion influencers as a low-quality and fashion-backward place to shop. Its going in and out of bankruptcy in 2017 added to this stigma. However, Payless had added a variety of fashion-forward shoes to its portfolio, and wanted to announce that the store was a great place to shop for high quality yet affordable high fashions.

The Brief

From Thanksgiving through the Holiday Season, consumers are bombarded with tremendous amounts of advertising clutter. Payless’ holiday advertising has, in the past, gotten lost. In 2018, we wanted to advertise Payless’ Holiday and Winter shoes in a way that broke through in an extremely cluttered media environment.

Objectives

- Increase awareness of Payless during the holiday season

- Communicate value-for-money proposition of Payless’ new shoe portfolio

- Create social media buzz

We opened a fake luxury store in LA, called it Palessi, and filled it with Payless shoes marked up by 1800%. We then invited fashionista influencers to an exclusive launch party. We conducted interviews throughout the day asking party guests to express their thoughts on the brand, planning to use their responses as footage in what ultimately became the commercial. The campaign entertains in part because of how thoroughly the Palessi branding persuades the fashionistas that the shoes are luxury items worth their enormous price tags (so much so they actually bought shoes ranging from $200-$640) and in part because of just how shocked they are to learn they’ve been duped.

Data revealed that our target shared a populist streak as well as an extreme interest in fashion. We explored this unexpected pairing in research and uncovered a tension. On one hand, these consumers had developed a taste for the fashion-forward items that Influencers were posting. On the other hand, most could not afford these items, and rejected influencer culture as either too superficial or too materialistic.

Target Audiences:

Consumer target: mainstream, budget-conscious shoppers.

Influencer target: fashion influencers.

Approach: Pranking Influencers, Across Platforms

We decided to pursue a unique influencer marketing approach of pranking influencers. We convinced influencers to pay 1800% mark-ups for Payless shoes, effectively endorsing these fashions for everyday Americans who could only the $10-$40 price range. Counter-intuitively, we also used this approach to gain the respect of fashion influencers, knowing that most professionals love and share humorous critiques of their industries.

Pop-Up Influencer Activation

October 27 & 28 - We hosted an opening party for Palessi. Typical of influencer events, we created an immersive high-touch experience, and used video to capture testimonials about the quality of the products and the “attitude” of the brand. The difference was that the event was “fake,” and the shoes were from Payless. We created videos of influencers endorsing the shoes.

Placement in Influencer Media

November 21 - We seeded the story of the pop-up event to the very group that we were making fun of: Fashion Influencers. Influencers rapidly spread word of the Palessi prank across Twitter, FB, and Instagram, turning Palessi into a viral phenomenon.

Mass-Media & Scale

November 28 - To give the pop-up widespread exposure, we seeded its story to mass-market news outlets, TV shows, fashion publications, and celebrity commentators. National television coverage began in late November and continued through mid-February.

Conversation spilled into popular culture globally:

8.8 billion total global earned media impressions (excluding TV/digital buy which began Dec 5th)

- Featured in 1,641+ broadcast shows across the U.S. alone

- Feature segments in Good Morning America, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, The

Steve Harvey Show, Ellen DeGeneres, The Real and MSNBC

- Forbes: “Brilliant Palessi Stunt”

- USA Today: “Genius marketing”

- The Washington Post: “The Prank of the Century”

- Maxim: “Don Draper-Level Brilliant Marketing”

1.5 billion+ impressions across Facebook & Twitter, spreading broadly through fashion, finance, hip hop and even sports.

- Questlove: “Champion Trolling”

- Barstool Sports: “Take a freaking bow, Payless. It actually makes me want to go shopping

at Payless because of how they dunked so hard on “influencers”

23% increase in Unaided Awareness

42% increase in Brand Consideration

46% increase in “Brand is Better Value”

Source: Payless Brand Tracker (among W18-49 buyers)