THE 14TH ANNUAL SHORTY AWARDS

The Shorty Awards honor the best of social media and digital. View this season's finalists!

Special Project

Special Project
From the 8th Annual Shorty Impact Awards

eBay: Winning Back Sneakerheads with an Influencer-Led 360 Campaign

Winner in Fashion and Beauty

Audience Honor in Fashion and Beauty

Objectives

eBay needed help reasserting itself as the authority in the sneaker sector. Despite its reputation as the OG marketplace of democratised selling and shopping, eBay faced increased eCommerce competition and flippers causing inflated prices that made sneakers unaffordable to normal people. eBay wanted to be seen as the better way to buy and sell sneakers.

With just four months from briefing to launch, the budget needed to cover activation, partnerships, paid media/ATL promotion, content/event production, and agency fees. Using an influencer-led 360-integrated campaign, spiked by experiential activations, we needed to achieve these campaign objectives:

Strategy and Execution

The target audience was:

Combining social listening, insight tool GWI & a focus group of influential sneakerheads we discovered three key insights:

This inspired our strategy for a campaign spiked by live events. Called OG Drops (built in partnership with Weber Shandwick), we created eBay’s first IRL eBay Sneaker Store in the UK, selling iconic kicks at their original market release price – not their inflated retail price.

To highlight female sneakerheads are just sneakerheads, women fronted the campaign and events – Julie Adenuga and Yasmin Evans hosted the activations.  

To achieve awareness, engagement and clicks to eBay's website, the campaign was built around influencers chosen via auditing frameworks/proprietary methodology/Woomio, ensuring they had solid KPI track records of audiences aligned to eBay’s typologies. Called The Collective, they fronted messaging on social, paid media & ATL ads with assets made by our studio. Our creative featuring The Collective was booked for OOH by MediaCom.

The Collective PR-ed digital OG Drops, the competition for tickets to the sneaker stores & what happened at the stores.

As the lead agency of this 360 campaign, we managed all partner relationships across owned, paid and organic to show by eBay as the brand that gives the sneaker market back to real fans. We deployed:

Seamless narrative and campaign authenticity combined to provide an innovative message that reasserted eBay’s market-leading status.

Results

This campaign bought the sneaker community back together in-person and achieved huge success versus hard objectives:

 

 

The campaign further exceeded everyone’s expectations with

The IRL Sneaker Store was so successful it unlocked another brief – to design and build a stand at Sneaker Con, the most prestigious community event in Europe.

Media

Video for eBay: Winning Back Sneakerheads with an Influencer-Led 360 Campaign

Entrant Company / Organization Name

SEEN Connects, eBay

Links

Entry Credits