Title	ADBLOCK RECRUITING
Brand	BOONDOGGLE
Product/Service	AGENCY SELF PROMOTION
Category	C01. Online Ad
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 decided to target the 10% of advertising people who use an adblocker. Because the people who hate traditional banner ads and prerolls, might be more motivated to create a different kind of campaign. So we created a banner that was only visible to adblock users, on the 3 major Belgian advertising websites: mm.be, pub.be and bloovi.be.We installed a plugin on 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.” Our plugin was integrated into the code of the 3 websites and made our banner a part of the site, so adblockers didn’t recognize it as an ad. Only adblock users saw our banner in the (usually empty) space where normally there would be a traditional banner ad. This was done in full cooperation with the websites.

Creative Execution

IMPLEMENTATIONOur plugin was integrated into the code of the 3 websites and made our banner a part of the site, so adblockers didn’t recognize it as an ad. Only adblock users saw our banner in the (usually empty) space where normally there would be a traditional banner ad. This was done in full cooperation with mm, pub and bloovi.TIMELINEThe banners ran for one month, from 26/11/2015 until 26/12/2015.PLACEMENTThe banners ran on the 3 major Belgian advertising websites, visited almost exclusively by people active in the Belgian advertising industry.SCALEThe total size of the Belgian advertising industry: about 20 000 people.The 3 websites we advertised on reach the total population. Our banner reached 10% of them.

REACHTotal reach of the websites: 169 000/ month. Since only 10% of visitors use an adblocker, our bannering campaign was displayed about 16 900 times. ENGAGEMENT-Traffic on our website almost tripled to 3000 unique visitors per week during the campaign.- Our campaign got picked up by major international advertising sites like Adweek. It was massively shared by advertising and media people, generating +3 000 000 twitter impressions and a lot of attention.- As a result of this campaign Boondoggle's CEO was invited by Google to be part of an international panel on adblocking.SALES- Thanks to all this international attention, we received applications from 16 countries.- 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.

DATA GATHERINGMM.be, an advertising website visited by almost everyone from the industry, reported to us that 10% of all visitors use an adblocker. Therefor, we know that about 10% of people in Belgian advertising, use an adblocker themselves.TARGET AUDIENCEOur strategic insight was that these people might be more motivated to come work for an agency that wants to make a different, more useful kind of campaigns, rather tan traditional online ads.So we decided to target them with our campaign.RELEVANCE TO PLATFORMThe best place to reach this target group was with a special message on the major advertising websites in the country. Only adblock users who visited this site, saw our banner.APPROACHWe directly confronted adblocking ad people with the irony of their online behaviour: “you block ads even if you work in advertising? Then maybe you’re the person we’re looking for."