I wouldn’t do something I genuinely considered immoral, but I’m definitely willing to make people uncomfortable or piss them off if there’s a good reason behind it.
A few years ago, we wanted to promote a crypto broker, so we printed a ton of paper wallets, loaded each one with $2-3 worth of BTC, and handed them out on the street.
We gave away around $20K in total. Within a few days, we had already made it back through commissions attributed to those users. Not 100% accurately, of course, and this wasn’t LTV. It was just based on purchases they made during those first few days.
The campaign also got a lot of press, which led to a big jump in new users. Years later, we found that the users who joined during that period ended up being much more valuable than average. I’m not entirely sure why. My guess is that their first interaction with us was unusually positive, but your guess is as good as mine.
Another cool thing we did recently was for an animal welfare nonprofit. We wanted to encourage people to consider adopting dogs from shelters instead of buying purebred dogs from breeders.
We partnered with a major retailer and launched a new “purebred dogs” category on their ecommerce store. We listed several dogs there at well below market price.
Naturally, it pissed a lot of people off. But anyone who actually added a dog to their cart saw a message saying:
“Dogs aren’t something you should buy. They’re something you should adopt.”
The message also included a link to our shelters.
The campaign received a lot of press, and we’ve seen a huge spike in adoptions over the past couple of weeks. It’s still ongoing, so we don’t have the final numbers yet.
We’re a digital agency, so we don’t get many chances to do this kind of thing, but it’s always a lot of fun when we do.
