Turning nothing to wear into something to love

With new competitors on the scene and a boom in pre-loved clothing, eBay wanted to reinforce its position as the ultimate destination for selling and buying fashion. To accomplish this, they focused on giving their customers the best possible experience—without fees. 

Yep, eBay scrapped selling fees for users selling pre-owned apparel on the platform, setting themselves apart in a highly competitive landscape. Now, they needed a unique campaign that would both announce this and promote the benefits of “re-commerce” and the flywheel (selling an item to free up money for another). After all, the best part of getting rid of old items is the potential for something new.

The average person in the UK has up to £2,700 of neglected clothes in their closet, but they still feel like they have nothing to wear. People’s habits of having and keeping too much altered the value they saw in their shackets, tops, and shoes. 

This despair fuelled a sense of fashion fatigue and hopelessness, as people felt they had nothing to wear despite having wardrobes full of items. 

Based on this, we developed a strategy and creative campaign to communicate two things: 

• With eBay, it’s free to sell old items 
• eBay is the solution to people’s fashion fatigue

With this message as the campaign’s North Star, we began building out the creative with the goal of mass awareness. 

We needed to communicate this universal problem and then present eBay as the solution. With eBay, selling unwanted clothes means funding your account and buying something you want to wear. 

Four unique stories were created for our millennial and Gen Z audiences, where eBay saved relatable fashionistas from their closets. 

We created a simple, repeatable structure for each story so they’d work as a standalone or be blended into a hero AV. 

Each story started with wardrobe despair and ended with wardrobe wonder. Finally, they’re wrapped up with a stylish fashion payoff, showing gorgeous inventory, styled well. 

The campaign was built across AV, OOH, social, and digital with different tactics and executions across each channel.

An Ipsos study of creative performance showed that all ad scenarios drove strong intent to choose eBay to sell pre-loved fashion, with motivation scores significantly above average. 

The clarity of our messaging ensured it landed with consumers, with all ads successfully lifting perceptions of free selling with no fees, as well as boosting trust from a buying and selling POV. 
They were also considered more unique and lively than those of key competitors.

The campaign outperformed in the upper funnel stage, delivering a 15% higher reach than benchmarks across all channels. 

Collectively, this assisted in achieving the overarching goal of increasing unaided brand awareness by +1ppt amongst sellers who had not listed or sold on eBay in the previous 12 months, as well as more active fashion and pre-loved sellers.