Our client, Back Market, wanted to enter the American market with its refurbished tech products. As this category of devices is not strong in the US, where the culture and perception of new tech products becomes an achievement status, the task was simple: create a campaign to appear as an alternative option to buying brand new smartphones.

As a startup, we have a strong advantage: a challenger status, with a strong culture for provocation and creativity. But it also came with a disadvantage: our budget was extremely limited. Our objective was clear: create awareness about who we are, and what we sell, through word of mouth as media buying for our messages was not possible.

Using influencers promoting what we sell quickly appeared as a good way to emerge and be trendy; but we realised that the amount of money needed for American celebrities to post something about what we sell was way too high for us.

The tech industry, especially the smartphone one, always pushes brand new model to make them appear as the perfect device for consumers. We all know that the products sold only 3 years ago are still really good, and way cheaper now than brand new ones, and we had to make people understand that. That was the first part of our insight: we are selling today what people really wanted a few years ago.

Then came the other part, about influencers and their social media accounts, sharing what they do, what they want, live to millions of followers. Then came our idea: these influencers were also wishing for our products years ago, too.

So to promote our refurbished products, we refurbished their tweets: we retweeted them as if they had just been posted the day before, with an silly comment about our dedication to fulfil their wishes. We sent to influencers the smartphones of their (past) dreams and let the whole world know about it online.

To promote our refurbished products, we refurbished all influencers verbatims about them to make their audience realize, without spending money, who we are, what we do, and what we sell.

Our first thought was to use influencers to value what we sell.

Sadly, American global superstars with millions of followers were absurdly out of our budget, asking for hundreds of thousands of dollars to publish a single tweet or an Instagram picture.

But we also realised that most of these American celebrities really wanted our products and had already tweeted about that years ago.

So, to promote our refurbished products, we decided to refurbish their tweets. We retweeted them as if they were published the day before and sent them the smartphones of their (past) dreams, creating the biggest online influencer campaign ever, for free, without the influencers even knowing it.

All of the following results were made without media investment, through a 100% organic spread of our idea.

- We refurbished 311 old tweets from old celebrities, including 2 POTUS (Barack Obama, Donald Trump) dozen of actors, singers, hip hop artists, novelists, TV show presenters, athletes, comic book artists, and even the founder of twitter

- A jump from an average of 100 customers per day before the launch on our US website to over 26 000 orders in the first 48 hours.

- A global increase of 427% of orders on our website for the month following the launch of our campaign.

- 3 different celebrities “involved” during the campaign acknowledged the initiative online after receiving the smartphones of their (past) dreams.

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