The Write What You Live recruitment campaign came from a bunch of people at Examiner.com. It’s genesis was started by an assistant channel manager at Examiner.com. Her manager, my friend, couldn’t figure her out as she was constantly late, had no focus or goals. Turns out she’d rather be in marketing or advertising and therefore spent her time coming up with taglines and foolishly pitching them to me. But for all the jayvee ideas, to her credit she came up with the tagline “We write what we live” and I turned this into a successful internet campaign including a video advertisement and a well-received Commission Junction affiliate program, complete with over 600 banner ads for affiliates to use.
The idea was that because too many people were dismayed by the amount of credibility one would need to write for us. Or experience. Turns out, you needed neither, just passion and some basic English. So we tapped into the passion pit: you love to do something, right? What is that? Now go write about it. It’s how we got people writing about Boise Gardening, Philadelphia Lacrosse, Seattle Disc Golf and much more. Turns out everyone thinks they’re an expert on something. Go figure. It, in essence, was both an informative tool to explain who we were and a recruitment tool to get others to apply.
This is how the campaign was presented to the client — my bosses — on how to deliver the message to masses in each city (Examiner.com—at the time I was creating this—was serving 110 cities nationwide). The idea was to put this on billboards, bus stops, etc. to draw interest. We also used them in 300 x 250 banner ads and other online and traditional (print) advertising.
Where the campaign ended up running was in various trades, conventions (Great American Beer Festival, etc.), and job fairs. Each ad depicts a happy person doing something they love, with the appropriate “channel” (the basic navigation blocks of the web site) called out.
Here are some more images:
