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2017 One Show - Interactive

Venmo Micro Hack

Agency Deutsch / New York

Client WATERisLIFE
BACK TO RESULTS

Annual ID

OS_IN17080M

About the Work

Millennials are ditching cash and credit cards for digital payments – and they don’t see donating to charities as an easy, everyday thing. Clean water charity WATERisLIFE hacked millennials’ favorite payment app to show them just how easy donating can be. WATERisLIFE targeted 1,000 people paying each other back on Venmo’s global feed, clicked their names, and sent them 1-cent each – exploiting Venmo’s unlimited character caption to turn every payment into a personalized ad. By finding a way around Venmo’s ad-ban, we created our own media channel. All ads were automatically published to users’ news feed for all their friends to see, and to Venmo’s public global feed. The campaign cost $10 – a sum that we turned into $1000 as people started paying us back. But more than that, WATERisLIFE got in front of millions of people, with a total of $1.78 million in earned media.