Newie - Let the customer do the advertising

The best impressions are those you don't pay for.

One of the major limitations of outdoor advertising is frankly how much the ads can blend into the environment, and aren't easily acted upon by the viewer. So, it typically takes quite a large budget - to serve enough impressions - that people subconsciously take notice of the brand.

In most cases, this puts outdoor ads off the media plan for most businesses till they reach a point of maturity where the investment into outdoor ads is more palatable. The case of Newie is a bit different; as a startup, they couldn't justify buying all of the impressions they needed for people to notice them. This created a question - could they get their own customers to generate the impressions they needed?

That lead to a series of artworks that looked something like this:

What we loved

There are so many things that were great about this campaign that it's quite hard to list them down exhaustively here, but it's important to realise that this wasn't just the one ad that did really well for Newie. There were several of these creatives made for quite a number of their users over the last 3 years. The design work speaks for itself - it's bold, consistent, easily viewable from a distance, and just generally very clean.

What struck our team as genius was how this campaign "cheated" its way to more impressions, though.

For some context, Newie is a payment services provider targeting sole traders and other businesses who need to take payment on the spot. One of the industries they serve is personal training. A happy coincidence is that many personal trainers rely upon their own social media reach & influence to build trust among each other within their respective spaces, but also to acquire new clients themselves. Some of these trainers maintain their social content religiously, and have followings of well over a million users.

So, why not get them to do the marketing for you?

So, with a relatively small outdoor budget, Newie was able to create an oversized impact - every impression they got outside of the immediate outdoor campaign was essentially earned exposure that they didn't have to pay for. So, from their perspective - not only did they have elated customers who relished seeing themselves on the billboards, they also reached far more people than they would have with a generic branded campaign.

A reaction from @jessicadebortoli here is a testament to this campaign's popularity:

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