Our Work / eBay live TV ads

The first TV ads with a live web feed

Rewind to Autumn 2007. eBay had 93% brand awareness in the UK. But, while people rationally knew that they could buy pretty much anything on eBay, it was still only top-of-mind for collectibles and hard to find items.

So we wanted to solve that by doing two things:

• Suggesting items that they people might like, when they are open to buying them.
• Reminding people that eBay is a live marketplace, and a uniquely exciting way to buy stuff.

Rather than some bland generic brand ad, we realised that the best way to do this was to demonstrate it, by simply showing people real live items that were currently available, that they might like.

Now, on the web, this kind of thing is a doddle. You make a nice Flash banner, and pull i a live data feed from the eBay website. But the brief called for us to reach 8m people in 2 weeks and make significant impact on the business. And TV is still the best way to hit those kind of numbers.

Chatting to our clever friends at media agency PHD, we concocted a plan to try and make the first TV ads with a live web feed. It shouldn’t be too difficult we figured, it was 2007 after all.

Four months later, after a lot of hard work with ITV, the BACC (now Clearcast), and Partizan (the animation company) we managed it. We had to reinvent the way ads were played out and approved, but we managed it.

The first time we tried to ‘serve’ our live ads, ITV crashed, with a blank screen and a hurried return to a surprised Angus Deyton and Hell’s Kitchen. After that they ran like a dream.

We featured clothes around fashion shows and home items around property shows. For example this one was served during What Not To Wear.

Whenever an ad ran, eBay saw a massive spike in activity in that category. An eBay community member was delighted when his Converse appeared, and the number of people ‘watching’ his item rose from 2 to 2000!

Tagged as: Community, Digital, eBay, TV, Widgets