Commercial websites: Captured (Agency: Grape Russia Grape Russia )

OBJECTIVE
Digital marketing conference is the biggest event for digital marketing professionals in Russia. However, people are not willing to pay for participating in such conferences because they are simply fed up with so called “local celebrities” or speakers with the same reports repeated conference by conference.

IDEA
To highlight that remarkable fact that only foreign speakers are invited we asked the leading professionals to take part in our ironic photo session. Popular marketing specialists became targets of our campaign showing that they have no chance to participate in DMC as this year only foreign experts are going to be invited.

EXECUTION
One morning Facebook profile pictures of ten leading professionals in the Russian digital market changed. At the same time strange banners appeared on the most popular marketing websites and information platforms. These profile pictures and banners pictured the professionals bound and gagged. They all led to the page featuring the most popular speakers of the industry with a slogan “Choose a target!”. The user chose the speaker he or she was the most tired of by clicking the appropriate photo and took revenge - we literally gagged all that annoying “celebrities” to give the floor to foreign speakers this year.

RESULTS
The viral campaign was successful; it had a brilliant PR effect among the Russian advertising community and high level of engagement. People turned out to be really tired of that guys and want some fresh reports and cases. As a result, without spending a dollar on media, Digital marketing conference 2013 had 900 participants and an increase in the amount of ticket sales by 90% compared to the previous year.

Виталик, прости! from GRAPE on Vimeo.