Hasta La Creative!

PR, Online
DMC 2013

Digital marketing conference (or DMC) is the largest and most significant event for digital marketing professionals in Russia. The main problem of many conferences in Russia is that people are not willing to pay for participating as they are simply fed up with so called “local celebrities” or speakers with similar reports repeated at all events. 

The main difference about DMC 2013 was inviting only foreign speakers. Therefore the challenge was to demonstrate the uniqueness of this event to the target audience. To stress this uniqueness of the conference we decided to make an ironic photo session under which known leaders of Russian digital industry acted as models. Creative directors, owners of advertising agencies and well-known marketing specialists became targets of our campaign showing that they have no chance to participate in DMC 2013 as this year only foreign experts are invited. 

After that one morning Facebook profile pictures of ten leading professionals of Russian digital industry suddenly changed. At the same time strange banners appeared on the core marketing websites and information platforms. They all led to a page featuring the most popular speakers of the industry where the user chose the speaker he or she was the most tired of and took revenge – we literally gagged all that annoying “celebrities” to give the word to foreign speakers this year. 

The viral campaign was effective. It gave brilliant PR effect among Russian advertising community and high users’ involvement. As a result, without spending a dollar on media buy, Digital marketing conference 2013 had 900 participants and increase in the amount of ticket sales by 90% compared to the previous year.

Advertising Agency:Grape, Moscow, Russia
Creative Director:Vladimir Garev
Creator:Artem Tsaregorodtsev
Art Director:Vsevolod Navashin
New Media Director:Mikhail Geisherik
Producer:Anton Kopylov
PRmanager:Arina Svetlitsa
Photo Production:GrandReport