This Two-Person Agency Spent $10,000 on Blank Ad Space

This time of year, agency holiday cards seek to one-up each other with clever (and self-promotional) ways to wish clients and audiences happy holidays. These greetings take just about every form you can think of, from humorous t-shirts to comfy sweaters and scarfs. This year, one agency decided to forego these festivities and offer local audiences nothing instead. More specifically, Halifax agency Wunder decided to give people a break from ads by purchasing $10,000 worth of blank ad space. We caught up with the founders of the two-person shop, creative director Stephen Flynn and director of innovation Mike Postma, to discuss their "White Christmas" stunt. Adweek: What led to the idea to gift people blank ads for the holidays? Whose idea was it? Flynn: We're a new agency so it was a way for us to get our name out there and join in the festivities ... forcing ourselves to come up with something that was two pronged: in terms of giving something to the general public and to get some positive press around the holidays. Postma: We just kind of came up with it together in a brainstorming sessions. We were going back and forth on this idea of if an ad agency was going to give back to the community what would they do? What would the thing be that you would really not expect to be coming from an ad agency? We came down to: Well, not an ad. You would never expect them to not do an ad of any kind. That's the idea that stuck and then the visual in our heads was a completely blank billboard. Which mediums did this run across? [kickout id="2"] Flynn: We bought billboards, bus shelters, the sides of buses, a full-page newspaper ad and we extended the campaign to run on social as well: Instagram ads, YouTube pre-roll and Facebook ads. The physical out-of-home installations felt like a real-life ad-block, whereas we wanted to extend that to platforms where you couldn't really ad-block as well. Postma: We also decided to try to do a radio ad. The first thing we tried to pitch the radio stations was just 10-15 seconds of dead air. We expected this, but we got some pushback on that one. They're not too keen to do that. So we ended up running a funny script, letting people know that we wanted to give them a break for the holidays and the radio station wouldn't let us run dead air. Then the announcement kind of stops for 5 seconds and says "But they were okay with this long pause. Happy holidays." [kickout id="1"] Was part of the idea that this would give people a break during the saturation of messages during the holidays? Flynn: It's the busiest season of the year for advertising. A little bit naive to assume that all ads are good ads. A few calls we got back is "Why would an agency do this? It’s kind of against everything they should be for." It's not that we think that ads are bad; we just know that people don't love ads. There's a reason the skip ad button exists. As an agency it's our job to try to push through noise and make things people want to engage with and don’t want to skip. This was kind of a commentary on that. As a strategy of rolling it out, we launched the blank ads. There's no name on it or anything. They existed in market for a week, and we took that week to shoot a campaign video for what we called "White Christmas." After the week, we launched the video because we wanted to have some notoriety behind this. Since then, the response has been pretty huge and people definitely appreciate the gesture of when everyone is doing ads during the holiday season, the one person who didn't is getting a lot of positive reaction for that. [kickout id="3"] How did you determine how much to spend? Postma: We just looked at the year that we had and said "What can we spend on a Christmas stunt?" Before landing on this idea we said, "Let’s try to stay in the 10K range." Once this idea came to us we decided to just spend the whole 10K on media. We tried to get some deals with various media agencies to make sure that we could get as many prime spaces as we could possibly get. It went really quite well. Flynn: With the timing, in non-ad agency fashion, we were actually quite prepared for this. A couple of months ago we came up with it, so we used the lead-time we had to make sure we got prime placements in the city. That was key. Otherwise we would have been on the outskirts of town. Because we had the insight a while ago it was a bit of a head start to get those placements. You can imagine the phone calls were humorous when we said "No, we want nothing on it." Even on their end, they were suggesting "How about snowflakes?" They even prejudged it at the moment and said "I don't know how much buzz it's going to create." How have people reacted, both within the ad industry and audiences in general? Postma: The overwhelming audience reaction is that people really like it. The first comments coming in were on social ads. A very common reaction to that was people going "10/10, I would buy." There were very sarcastic comments, with people just assuming that someone messed up. Once that got rolling and then the first article came out, a week later and that got shared around social the overwhelming response was "Thank you, you're so awesome for doing this." People really appreciated the break. Flynn: It started a bit of a debate where people go "What a waste of money" and somebody commented and said "This is great press for them." [Other people] had their own idea of how they'd spend the money after the fact. There were some people out there at least defending it and understanding the point. Postma: A lot of people mentioned we should have at least put our name on it, very small in the corner. We strongly believed that that would have compromised the concept. The concept works so strongly because it truly is a blank ad. If you put anything on it, it's an ad. You have to believe that that concept will work. What do you hope people take away from this? Flynn: In the ad community I think the takeaway would be that brutal simplicity is still possible. It's not like everything has been done. This is something that after a lot of Googling, we were surprised that in no shape or form had anyone done a blank ad. We feel like we've had some good ideas before where somewhere down the road you always find out it was derivative of some other campaign. It's [still] possible to come up with something that hasn’t been done before. Would you do this again or pursue a new idea for 2020? Flynn: Definitely a new idea for 2020. I saw some people in the Reddit comments saying they should do a crowdsourced company that everyone donates money to and the money goes to ad buys for blank ads and they just continue doing that. Who knows? Postma: Ultimately this was very much a self-promo stunt, obviously. In that respect it has worked quite well already. We've had several potential new clients reached out. We have a couple of new meetings set up.

Marketing Innovation

This Two-Person Agency Spent $10,000 on Blank Ad Space

Halifax shop Wunder is behind the White Christmas stunt

Erik Oster

About

Subscriptions

Events

Publications

WORK SMARTER - LEARN, GROW AND BE INSPIRED.

Subscribe today!

Erik Oster