Since you have to eat, breathe and sleep advertising if you want to make it in this industry, we figured: let’s offer international creative interns a place to learn and a place to sleep. So we posted our agency, situated in a beautiful loft in the heart of Amsterdam, on Airbnb and created a video to announce our search for creative interns. Interns could stay at our loft for free in exchange for their creativity.

By thinking beyond the standard set of means and using Airbnb as a groundbreaking recruitment tool, our vacancy got picked up quickly by industry magazines, blogs and Twitter news feeds and reached ambitious creative talents.

We used the existing functionalities and characteristics of the Airbnb platform to work for us. With very sharp pricing and by adding humour to our text and the photography we positioned our office smartly among the other options.

We created a short video and a series of photos showcasing our loft and office Chihuahua. We used this to create an attractive profile on Airbnb and to push our campaign on social media in a noticeable way.

We knew that if one leading ad magazine would write about it, other magazines and blogs would follow. So we created a press kit that we sent out to all the leading ad magazines. Adweek picked up on it, and as we expected lots of magazines and blogs followed.

In total our campaign got over 8.5 million impressions via industry titles and social media (includes only the ones we could quantify) and created awareness within the advertising industry in the following countries: United States, Canada, Belgium, Mexico, Indonesia, Morocco, Australia, India, France, Spain, Turkey, Germany, Italy, Russia, the Netherlands and the UK.

In the end we received 244 applications resulting in a pool of 71 serious international creative interns. The first intern, Hammid from Canada, already spent a week with us.

Equally important, we got a lot of positive reactions from people in the creative industry and advertisers from both the Netherlands and abroad. And our campaign has been nominated for and granted with several national and international advertising awards and was included in a Digiday article entitled ‘How 6 agencies are reinventing recruiting’.