PAYPAL = PROMISE

TitlePAYPAL = PROMISE
BrandPAYPAL
Product / ServiceBRAND AWARENESS
CategoryA02. Best Use of Social Media
EntrantTHE SECRET LITTLE AGENCY Singapore, SINGAPORE
Entrant Company:THE SECRET LITTLE AGENCY Singapore, SINGAPORE
PR/Advertising Agency:THE SECRET LITTLE AGENCY Singapore, SINGAPORE
2nd PR/Advertising Agency:TEXT 100 Singapore, SINGAPORE

Credits

Name Company Position
Valerie Lim TSLA Planner
Nicholas Ye TSLA Writer
Eunice Tan TSLA Planner
Jonathan Yip TSLA Art Director
Mavis Neo TSLA Producer
Verdy Yong TSLA Technologist
Lee Hanyi TSLA Art Director
Jeremy Huang TSLA Musical Director
Julian Chow Text100 Executive
Jeremy Seow Text100 Director
Jolin Tan Text100 Manager

The Campaign

Everybody had heard of the brand. The message was nothing new, and largely forgotten. We needed to get social media coverage for PayPal with the message that PayPal kept its promises. To do this we created a boy band to sing songs in response to the most influential bloggers in Singapore & Malaysia. Every blogger received a customized music video. Within days of receiving their video, over 90% of all bloggers reached out to in Singapore & Malaysia responded, giving PayPal and it's product offering an unprecedented amount of quality, unpaid endorsement in Singapore & Malaysia. Seeing that this was PayPal's first foray into the Singapore & Malaysia blogger-sphere, the campaign has also established firm, positive impressions and feelings among these influencers. This will go along way, in PayPal's future digital consumer PR activities.

The Brief

To goal was to get positive, unpaid digital PR coverage from Singapore & Malaysia's most influential bloggers. To do this, we went through each and every prominent influencer in Singapore & Malaysia scouring through a list of over 600, defining influence by monthly blog readership, visits, Facebook friends, Twitter followers and Linkd-In connections. 20 bloggers made the shortlist with a total combined reach of 1.6 million in Singapore & Malaysia.

Results

The campaign not only fufilled basic brand awareness objectives, but also more meaningful, priceless unpaid, product endorsements from these influencers! The hard statistics till date are as follows: (1) Online buzz increased by 700% in Singapore, and almost 2500% in Malaysia (2) 90% of the bloggers reached out to responded! (3) Cumulative reach of over 1,090,000 across Singapore & Malaysia (4) Accumulated over SGD $100,000 of PR value in the 1st week alone (5) Doubled Paypal’s positive online in both countries, to 44.6% in Singapore and 51.8% in Malaysia *Findings from Brandtology social listening till 28th July 2011

Execution

To bring to life this benefit of a kept promise, we created a boy-band called THE PROMISE, to sing in response to Singapore & Malaysia’s top bloggers and their blog postings. This involved: 1) Creating a band from scratch, casting and talent scouting for 4 boys who could sing, act and dance. 2) Musically composing an original song from scratch 3) Picking 20 Blog Posts from 20 of Singapore & Malaysia's TOP Bloggers 4) Writing lyrics for 20 songs to our originally composed, tune, which were different and bespoke 5) Recording these 20 different songs and mastering them. 6) Taking those 20 songs to create 20 Music Videos 7) Creating an additional song which was meant for circulation to national radio 8) Sending these 20 videos out to each blogger for action

The Situation

PayPal faced great difficulty finding consumer based PR angles for the brand and its varied product offering. We had no product to launch, and nothing new to say about a brand and product that the digital PR realm already knew so much of. Online, the situation was even more challenging as many fan created “hate” sites from outside of Singapore & Malaysia dotted search engine pages. Many of these pages had messaging that challenged the very messaging objectives of our campaign. We needed to communicate that shopping with PayPal was safer because it guaranteed transactions with its Buyer Protection policy.

The Strategy

We humanized and simplified the key benefit of using PayPal and gave it relation to that of a promise kept. This became the PR Message, that Paypal keeps it's promises. This was also what using PayPal ensures when you transact with it, that promises made by vendors to you, are kept.