Since 2018, Mercari has trusted Rain the Growth Agency's DTC expertise to create impactful campaigns and execute media buys that simultaneously increase app downloads and awareness. As a result, as Mercari continues to grow, each campaign demonstrates how easily the Mercari app can help anyone give new life to their unused things.
Mercari was founded in Japan, where there is a culture of not throwing things away and repurposing them for another use. The campaign embraces that cultural value and demonstrates the idea that "one person's trash is another person's treasure."
Inspired by the Beatles' classic, "Hello, Goodbye," the "Goodbye, Hello" campaign spins the iconic song to highlight the online marketplace's selling and buying features. At its core, Mercari is about connecting people. When people shop on the platform, they discover items that will breathe new life into their space. For sellers, they are passing meaningful things on for others to enjoy. We developed a campaign that perfectly amplifies this concept, as well as the emotion behind it – one person's "goodbye" is another's "hello."
The campaign objective was simple — drive incremental awareness for Mercari with high-reach OTT media. Since the beginning of the partnership, the agency intentionally balanced performance goals to increase brand awareness as Mercari establishes a stronghold in the increasingly competitive resale industry.
Our challenge was to evoke the satisfaction people have when they pass things along and the connection that exists between sellers and buyers when that happens. Our strategy was to develop authentic creative promoted through strategic media buys that would bring our message to the masses.
IDENTIFYING THE RIGHT CHANNEL
We used our ConsumerID™ tool to conduct an in-depth analysis of Mercari's first-party data, from which we determined that a core audience segment of Mercari's users are light linear TV viewers. Our media planning team quickly identified OTT as a scalable channel to achieve incremental reach, especially amongst that group.
The campaign launched after Christmas 2020. It included six direct vendors (including the three largest ad-supported platforms), six programmatic video audience targets, multiple DSPs, display retargeting to users post-initial video view, premium units, sponsorships and content placement to cement Mercari as a key player in the OTT space across all major tactics within the channel.
As Mercari's agency of record, we also executed the media buy with CBS. The campaign debuted across audio, paid social, OTT, and high-profile TV. Spots aired during NFL playoff games, SNL, and Ellen.
AUTHENTIC CREATIVE
The creative intentionally spans a very diverse set of buyers and sellers across many life stages to demonstrate the breadth and growth of this market. To make this genuine – and because of COVID - we cast a diverse set of actors who were already living together to amplify authentic emotions and highlight Mercari's connectivity value. The result is a campaign that shows buying and selling with meaningful connections for everyone involved.
Additionally, we paid tribute to Mercari's Japanese roots by embedding a few examples of Kintsugi — the Japanese art of putting broken pottery pieces back together with gold. The campaign embraced the idea that gently used items can turn into highly valued things when passed on to someone who needs them.
For the music, Mercari invested in having the rights to the infamous Beatles song. The title of the song is "Hello, Goodbye", was reversed for the campaign name, which plays on the steps of a Mercari transaction: the seller says "goodbye" to their unused item, and the buyer says" hello" to it. An independent, female artist also recorded the song cover.
LEANING INTO KEY CULTURAL MOMENTS
Our data also revealed our audiences' interest in sports. Leaning into this fact, we secured Mercari's first Super Bowl spot and sponsorship of "The Shaq Bowl" kickoff event as our vehicle to meet mainstream America. The sporting element also allowed us to highlight the happiness of decluttering and the thrill of scoring a hard-to-get item.
Sponsoring the virtual pregame event, headlined by Shaquille O'Neal, brought an experiential component to our marketing efforts.
In "Mercari Presents the Shaq Bowl," fans got a chance to see the basketball legend broadcasting live from Tampa. Hosted by NFL hall-of-famer Terrell Owens, pro-bowler Chad "Ochocinco" Johnson and sportscaster Sarah Walsh, it also featured musicians, including Migos and DJ Diesel.
The campaign results were astounding! Mercari registered measurable growth in brand equity and ranked in the top 10 for three other brand attribute metrics: momentum (6th), quality (7th), familiarity (10th).
The spot aired at 7:57pm Eastern time, placing it in the second-highest rated quarter-hour of the game. Mercari was one of only a few brands to air a :15-second spot in the national broadcast with 92 million viewers, according to Nielsen.
Overall, the campaign achieved 35% awareness goal just in Q1 while also hitting targeted ROI. In addition, it was the first time a women-founded and women-led advertising agency produced the creative campaign and secured the media for a Big Game ad.
