Why eBay turned to TV families to declutter the nation
The Media Plan
The UK is a nation fond of clutter. In fact, 56% of Brits say whole rooms are unusable due to clutter and 20% hold on to unwanted stuff for a decade.
So EssenceMediacom had a challenge on its hands when it was tasked by client eBay with promoting the message that it is now free to sell on the platform.
As Lindsey Jordan, UK head of creative strategy, creative futures, at EssenceMediacom, explained: “We needed to create a behaviour change. If you don’t use it, if you don’t love it, sell it on eBay.”
The key word for the media team was “motivate”. Through this campaign, EssenceMediacom needed to show the public that it’s a common behaviour to sell things you don’t need and motivate them to do it themselves.
This word thus informed the agency’s channel and partner choices. In particular, the team wanted to find “credible partners that showed real people you trust selling on eBay” and “publicly consumed channels that signal trust and drive ‘common knowledge’”.
To achieve that, EssenceMediacom devised a media plan comprised of mass-reach AV, audio and OOH elements, contextually relevant digital activity as well as a partnership with Channel 4’s Googlebox.
‘GoggleBayers’
For Jordan, the centrepiece of the campaign was the Gogglebox partnership that turned the cast into “GoggleBayers”.
She explained: “The Gogglebox families are the epitome of real-life Britain, a reflection of the nation. And their entire programme is filmed in their lounges, which are full of clutter and stuff they could sell.”
In an ad break takeover, five Gogglebox families watched the latest eBay ad and discussed what they wanted to sell.
This content was then turned into cutdowns and deployed across Channel 4, VOD and social media.
One further idea from the team was to create an augmented-reality lens that would have allowed users to sell what they see. Unfortunately, that was one element of the campaign that had to be sacrificed.