Title	ADBLOCK RECRUITING
Brand	BOONDOGGLE
Product/Service	AGENCY SELF PROMOTION
Category	A02. Data-Driven Targeting
Entrant	BOONDOGGLE Leuven, BELGIUM
Idea Creation	BOONDOGGLE Leuven, BELGIUM
Media Placement	BOONDOGGLE Leuven, BELGIUM

Name	Company	Position
Frederik Clarysse	Boondoggle	Creative Director
Wietse De Ridder	Boondoggle	Creative
Xandra van der Mersch	Boondoggle	Account executive
Johan Van Oeckel	Boondoggle	Creative
Sam De Vriendt	Boondoggle	Creative Director

The Campaign

We found out that about 10% of the visitors of the three major Belgian advertising websites, used an adblocker. Hence we can extrapolate that 10% of the Belgian advertising population blocks the online work of their own industry. At Boondoggle, we decided to embrace this group, because the people who hate traditional online advertising, are more likely to create more innovative solutions. So we decided to target them with a special message on the 3 major Belgian advertising websites: mm.be, pub.be and bloovi.be. We integrated a plugin into the code of each of these websites. It detected adblock users and showed them a special message: “you block ads even if you work in advertising? Then maybe you’re the person we’re looking for.” Why wasn't this detected by adblock? Our plugin was integrated into the code of the 3 websites and made our banner a part of the site. So we completely surprised adblock users with a message in the (usually empty) space where normally there would be a traditional banner ad.

We received more than 60 applications from 16 countries during the campaign (1 month). That's four times the usual number.- We had only 4 open positions, but so far we hired 6 new people: 2 strategists, 1 UX designer, 1 creative team, 1 account Mgr, 1 account executive.- Because our banner wasn't uploaded via ad servers, but instead integrated into the website's code, we couldn't measure the Click Through Rate. But we do know:1) Our banner was displayed about 16 900 times in 1 month (10% of the 3 site's total reach)2) Traffic on our website tripled to about 3000 unique visitors per week during the campaign.AWARENESS- Our campaign got major attention from sites like Adweek, generating +3 000 000 Twitter impressions.- As a result of this campaign our CEO was invited by Google to be part of a panel on adblocking.

The three major advertising in Belgium, shared with an important piece of user data about 10% of them use an adblocker. Since they are only visited by people from the industry, that showed us 10% of Belgian advertising people use an adblocker. This insight sparked a remarkable and succesful recruitment campaign. Because we believed the people who hate traditional advertising are the ones we needed to recruit, we decided to target exactly these people with a recruitment banner.

The three major Belgian advertising websites, mm.be, bloovi.be, pub.be, shared with us their data on adblock usage among their visitors. Since they are almost exclusively visited by people who work in the industry, it was quite shocking to see about 10% use an adblocker. So we concluded that about 10% of the people in our industry nationwide, don't want to experience the online work of their own industry. Which made us conclude that they are fed up with traditional ways of advertising. We decided to target these people in a surprising way: with a message on these three websites, only visible to adblock users. “you block ads even if you work in advertising? Then maybe you’re the person we’re looking for.”