You're unwelcome

Challenge:

Widely known as the safer, easier online payment method, PayPal offers secure online payment options and services for businesses as well as consumers.

However, many medium and large UK online merchants regarded PayPal strictly as a small-business solution.

We needed to puncture this prejudice and show the e-commerce decision makers how adding a PayPal option to their websites would significantly drive sales, and fast.

Solution:

The campaign needed to show at a glance how easy it is to lose millions of customers, and how PayPal makes it easy to keep them.

The resulting ‘Unwelcome' campaign concept poses a confrontational question - ‘Are you making 20 million online shoppers feel unwelcome?' - and employs visual irony with a humorous touch. Our Unwelcome concept grabs attention in an entertaining way and drives home the point both on the creative and informational fronts: PayPal makes much more of an impact than you expect.

The campaign ran in press publications such as Retail Week, Management Today, Drapers and Revolution. Online sites that included Internetretailing.net, Drapers Online, Retail Week, Marketing Week and Management Today Online.

We also used Direct Mail, Micro-Sites and the E-commerce Expo.

Results:

From the campaign, PayPal hoped to gain 20-30 new medium-sized merchants and 5-10 new large merchants, 40 new registrations in total.

Our campaign results are nearly triple that expectation, and most of the new clients are larger e-commerce websites.

Specifically, the campaign has attracted 412 inquiries to PayPal's sales team, resulting in over 100 appointments. To date, 13 online retailers have gone live with their new PayPal payment options, while 105 more have added PayPal and are in progress with their integration.

PayPal was so pleased with the outcome that they asked us to extend the Unwelcome campaign with new executions in 2009, and broadened our role to include complete redevelopment of their UK B2B website.