Trade Me is New Zealand’s most popular auction site; our version of eBay. In fact it’s so big, we don’t even have eBay in New Zealand. A staggering 81% of New Zealanders use Trade Me. It’s also the country’s largest marketplace for pets, with thousands of puppies being sold on the site ever year.

Trade Me has no restrictions or rules for how the puppies are sold which creates the perfect selling platforms for puppy mills. Animal right’s group, Paw Justice wanted Trade Me to set regulations to stop puppy millers from selling on their site.

With minimal budget, we needed to capture the attention of the media and create a groundswell of public pressure to force Trade Me to change the rules.

To do this, we used Trade Me against itself, by auctioning Paw Justice ads on the auction site to raise the money to run them.

Every ad was sold before Trade Me even noticed the listings, proving even further that they needed to take a closer look at what was being sold on their site.

Not only did we raise enough money to run all of the ads, we sparked a series of investigative news stories which rallied the public behind our cause.

The very next day Trade Me caved under the public pressure and announced that they were setting new rules for anyone selling animals on their site.

1. After uploading the auctions to Trade Me, we used social media to promote them; asking our followers/fans to share and bid, as well as targeting famous animal lovers.

2. At the same time, this was supported via targeted digital advertising to create further awareness.

3. Campbell Live ran several exclusive investigative stories. As well as talking about our campaign, they interviewed victims of Trade Me puppy millers, investigated sellers and ran a poll – which came back 82% in our favour. They also interviewed a Trade Me representative who admitted that did nothing to regulate pet sellers on their website.

4. We then engaged wider media organisations and by the next day, stories about our campaign were in every major newspaper, TV news bulletin and radio station. The ads funded by the Trade Me auction then ran on TV, radio, online and in Auckland’s daily newspaper.

Most importantly we reached the people we were targeting. The day after our campaign launched, Trade Me caved to public pressure and announced through the media that they would set new rules for anyone selling animals on their site.

With over 100 bids (and thousands of page views) not only did we raise enough money to run our ads, but in just two days and after spending only $15,000 our story had appeared on every major media outlet in New Zealand. Gaining over one million dollars worth of earned media and starting a conversation across New Zealand about whether animals should even be sold on Trade Me at all.

The public supported our cause on social media, creating 16.5 million impressions on Twitter and Facebook (over 4x the population of New Zealand) with an 83% organic reach on Facebook.

We received 27,000 signatures, 7000 more than our goal.