‘Got fired?’ Recruitment brand Adorio played a Trump card with its out-of-home advertising
Spellcaster Agency won the ‘Advertising‘ category at The Drum Awards for Marketing 2021 with its ‘Got Fired?’ campaign for Adorio. Unperturbed by a tight budget, this tongue-in-cheek and timely billboard campaign achieved global impact.
The challenge
The task was to build instant brand awareness for Adorio, a startup challenger brand in the online recruitment industry. Its target market was Croatia – and the budget was extremely limited.
The strategy
Knowing that the 2020 American presidential election was one of the most controversial in history, the team concluded that a great number of people around the world didn’t so much want Biden to win as they wholeheartedly hoped Trump would lose. Spellcaster Agency wanted to utilize this momentum to gain traction with earned media.
The campaign
Seeing the opportunity for a well-timed, newsjacking out-of-home campaign, the team posted a handful of billboards around Zagreb, the capital of Adorio’s target market nation Croatia. Playfully referencing the television show that brought Trump to international fame, the boards proved infinitely shareable in the run-up to the election.
The work ran for a period of 14 days on out-of-home positions but reached countless media across the globe in under 48 hours after the campaign’s launch.
The results
All major national media carried news of the campaign, as did nearly 200 online media outlets worldwide; among them tier one media such as the Washington Post, Guardian, ABC News, Associated Press, MSN, Fox News, Seattle Times, NBC, SF Chronicle, US News, New Zealand Herald, The Telegraph, Libération and countless other media from Korea, China, Japan, Lithuania, Mexico, Germany, Australia, the Philippines, Bulgaria, and even Bangladesh.
The campaign achieve an estimated $90m in earned media attention worldwide, as well as total tier one media coverage in Croatia, with an investment of only $10,000 in the campaign, more than half of which was the media buying cost.
The number of visits on the Adorio website rose by more than 8000% and the tiny startup challenger brand quickly became famous.
This project was a winner at The Drum Awards for Marketing 2021. Find out which competitions in The Drum Awards are currently open and don’t forget to visit our new interactive calendar.