During the holiday season, consumers are inundated with choices and promotional messaging from retailers attempting to influence their holiday shopping behavior. In order to break through the clutter, eBay launched the Wish Bigger campaign, inspiring consumers to think about eBay and gifting in a whole new way. The campaign aimed to inspire users to consider eBay as their one-stop holiday destination where they can find a wide variety of unique gifts ranging from rare, interesting, collectables to brand new, trending products.
The campaign messaging reinforced eBay as a trusted go-to resource for all holiday needs, allowing consumers to Wish Bigger for themselves and their loved ones with bigger selections, bigger brands & bigger deals. To kick off the campaign and create buzz around the activation, eBay, Deep Focus and Moment Studio launched the Wish Bigger contest across multiple social channels. The contest called users to enter by commenting on eBay social posts stating the person they are Wishing Bigger for, along with the item they wish to gift (including a link to the gift from eBay.com). This not only incentivized engagement across social channels but also increased traffic to the eBay website.
To spread awareness of the contest and encourage additional entries, eBay told the story of one winner through a heartwarming short film. The winner, Justin, Wished Bigger for his father who left his country at a young age in search of the American Dream. Justin's entry asked eBay to gift his father with a laptop so that he can communicate with family members who still live overseas.
Justin was excited that he'd won a laptop, but he had no idea what else we had in store for him, and it was all caught on film. Instead of gifting the one simple prize, eBay produced a full day experience for the winner and his father, starting with a visit to their home in Staten Island and ending with a trip to New York City where they were presented with a glass-walled truck filled with beautiful holiday décor and numerous personalized gifts all found on eBay.com. The experience was captured and featured in the touching short film shared across eBay social channels to reinforce the Wish Bigger messaging, encouraging users to participate in the contest for their chance to win.
To create a full 360 campaign, eBay also launched a customized holiday hub featuring enticing products and deals, produced an extensive collection of content spanning from static to video to influencer Vines, developed a custom Airstream bringing exclusive deals across the US, leveraged paid media across multiple social platforms and launched an interactive Black Friday/Cyber Monday deals experience.
The contest video proved success as one of eBay's top 10 most-watched videos, garnering over 7MM views while the contest itself drove positive engagement across social platforms, generating over 48MM impressions.
During the campaign period, the eBay published content from emerging channels drove 7.8x more daily sessions (verified and tagged traffic) to eBay.com vs the prior year period.
Additionally, the contest garnered over 1K verified submissions from users who sought to Wish Bigger during the holiday season!
