How Amazon Holds Small Businesses Hostage
With more than 28,000 patient members, Dialysis Patient Citizens (DPC) is working to improve the quality of life for all dialysis patients through education and advocacy. DPC is a nationwide, non-profit, patient-led organization with membership open only to dialysis and pre-dialysis patients and their families.
Client
NAW
Year
2023
Type of Work
Explainer Video
Static Graphics
Custom Audience Targeting
Ad Placement
The Challenge
We often hear this from clients:
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We are facing an uphill legislative battle.
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We need an engaging message explaining a wonky policy issue.
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The opposition is well-funded.
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We need to go live ASAP.
This is exactly where we found ourselves with the National Association of Wholesalers-Distributors (NAW). They were working to pass the American
Innovation and Choice Online Act, educate policy decision makers on the issue, and were going up against Amazon in the process.
The challenge was to create something that was both biting and funny. And we only had about a week to pull it off.
Keep scrolling to see how the strategy and creative for this campaign was developed.
Creative Direction
Once we settled on the concept direction and finished script writing, we only had about a week to bring it to life - that's including style exploration, design, voice over recording, and animation.
Despite this time constraint, we knew that 3D was the best way to personify a shipping box while conveying literal depth and scale, which was perfect for illustrating the figurative scale at which
Amazon has been"swallowing" up main street businesses left and right.
This concept would have been impractical to convey through more traditional forms of 2D animation, and nearly impossible with live action given the timeline and budget. 3D also allowed us to achieve a quirky but clean style, which was vital for maintaining NAW's brand image.
Targeted Custom Audience
Reaching elected officials and key policy influencers was a critical component of this campaign. This is why we employed custom research in creating a comprehensive policy insider audience of 15,000 high value individuals.
We were then able to effectively reach these individuals across numerous digital channels no matter if they were in DC or back home.
Static
Graphics
In order to keep the visual style consistent across the campaign, we used stills from the explainer video when designing the static ads.
Everywhere All At Once
Since we were honing in on a small, but valuable audience, we used an efficient ad budget launched across Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Connected TV, pre-roll, and display to make the target audience feel like this ad campaign was a 7-figure effort. This included creating custom versions of each display ad, along with shorter cuts of the main video ad to leverage all available inventory.
Reporting
Most agencies do not want to run a campaign across so many ad platforms because it's labor-intensive and requires complicated reporting. We do things differently, and have developed live ad reporting dashboards so that all stakeholders can monitor ad metrics across all platforms at any time.
This also means that we provide unparalleled transparency when it comes to ad performance.
When ad performance metrics are readily available and automated like this, it allows our team to provide the client with actionable insiahts and recommendations with strategic implications.
Results
While a legislative victory could not be claimed, the campaign proved to be a win for NAW and their members.
1. They produced an engaging and memorable video ad complimented with matching static ads
2. Their ad was viewed 1.13M times with an 82.4% completion rate on an efficient budget
3. Lawmakers, staff, and members mentioned to NAW that they were seeing the ads everywhere and contributing to the 1,875 social media engagements the ad received
4. Their members took pride in challenging Amazon head-on
Keep scrolling to see how the strategy and creative for this campaign was developed.
BTS and
Style Development
Keep scrolling for a little
peak behind the scenes.