The Campaign

We removed the Christmas friction, creating The Shop off the Beaten Path movement; connecting hungry-for-gift-spiration shoppers, with bespoke, quirky, adventurous, beautiful, geeky and trending merchants. We developed a mobile-first, smart search shopping portal - a hub for our merchants to exist within their respective categories. These categories and merchants were checked against the highest performing verticals of Christmas 2015, clothing, general and retail, home and garden, sports and beauty and fragrances. Kicking off with a call-to-arms awareness video challenging Australians to raise their gift-giving game, the campaign stepped consumers through a journey that utilised interactive banners, Facebook Canvas and Carousel units, Instagram flat-lays, homepage takeovers and direct communications via PayPal-owned assets.

Creative Execution

At the heart of the campaign was the SOTBP hub. As well as featuring over 150 local Aussie merchants, the hub enabled consumers searching for inspiration to discover unique gifts via the most popular gifting search terms during the time period (such as bespoke, adventurous, and trending) rather than the standard ‘for him/for her’ categorisation. To populate the hub, we invited PayPal-enabled businesses to join the campaign before launch. Over and above the 150+ unique merchants were able to feature, a further thousand downloaded a digital toolkit to feature campaign assets in their comms. Launching in October, we were able to be top of mind for consumers during Black Friday and Cyber Monday - and then ran through to mid-January to capitalise on the post-Christmas sales. To spread the word, the campaign utilised Facebook Carousels, Canvas and video, as well as Youtube pre-rolls, display, owned assets and an eBay partnership.

Results

The platform was supported by an integrated campaign that used social, owned assets, display, PR and influencers to showcase over 150 merchants in our Shop off the Beaten Path Network, resulting in over 236 million impressions. That wasn’t the only great result – in fact, Shop off the Beaten Path smashed every target set, with 1.39 million transactions - 19% above target, creating $82 million dollars in total payment volume - 43% above target, resulting in $2.36 million dollars in revenue - 39% above target, a whopping 242% return on investment - not to mention the fact the campaign extended PayPal’s lead in brand consideration by 4%. - Over 150 merchants were featured on the campaign hub - 52,000 visits to the hub within the first three weeks - 80,000 transactions in the first three weeks - An incredibly high 65% visit to transaction conversion rate

A first for PayPal, this campaign connected merchants and consumers in a two-way ‘gift-spiration’ network. It began with PayPal engaging its partners through owned channels to take part, and the response was unprecedented: 1500+ local merchants expressed interest, of which we were able to feature 140+ in the campaign, while another 1000 downloaded the SOTBP toolkit, allowing them to share the campaign with their customers. Plus, almost half the revenue generated was directly attributable to owned channels thanks to smart audience engagement including regular eDMs, display and social that targeted them when they were in a retail frame of mind.

A study of Australian’s Christmas gift giving through Galaxy Research indicated that nearly a quarter of Australians (4 million) consider themselves to be lazy gift-givers and two thirds of Australians (66%) say they received less than two unique gifts last Christmas. What’s more, many small and medium businesses (SMBs) rely on the Christmas season for over half of their annual sales (The Guardian, November 2015). SMBs are busy, anxious and stressed at this time; getting their attention and participation in a campaign is challenging, as they seek to avoid additional complexity. Our strategy was to position PayPal as the integral solution, catering to the emotional needs of consumers, at the same time partnering with our smaller merchant partners, who can’t compete with the big retailers’ Christmas marketing budgets. Our single-minded Proposition for the campaign was: PayPal killed the forgettable gift.