HELL pizza is a New Zealand-wide retail pizza chain. They were launching an online loyalty programme called ‘Sell your Soul for Pizza’ where customers could sign away their souls in return for hellish deals. With limited advertising budgets they constantly struggle for attention in the competitive fast food marketing environment, so they wanted a big idea to put the focus on them, and their upcoming loyalty programme.So we decided to have someone actually try to sell their soul for real on New Zealand’s eBay equivalent and largest online auction site, TradeMe. At this stage there was no connection between the auction and HELL pizza.The auction went ballistic and (with a few tip-offs) the media picked up on it - first in New Zealand, then around the world. Bidding for the soul became ferocious and eventually grew to $5000 before Trademe pulled the auction in a storm of controversy.That’s when HELL stepped in. In front of national news media they handed over $5001 cash to the seller of the soul in a heroic goodwill gesture, which wasn’t much to pay for an estimated audience of 33,000,000.

STEP1: We set up a Facebook profile by the name Lucie Lox and used her to build a friends database that contained media personalities including TV, Radio, Press, musicians, presenters and artists.STEP2: We independently recruited a guy to sell his soul.

STEP3: Once the auction was live, Lucie Lox sent a message to her friends encouraging them to ‘check out the weirdo selling his soul on TradeMe.’ STEP4: To further build our story on the auction page, we had someone from our agency responding to questions, acting as the seller.

STEP5: For the launch to be deemed a success we had to ensure that HELL was the successful bidder.But it didn’t entirely go to plan. Due to overwhelming website traffic on the auction, Trademe decided to pull it. So we leaked the story to media that HELL wanted to help out the guy, who now wasn’t getting anything for his soul. Then in front of the public and national media HELL entered the picture like heroes, and met our guy to buy his soul for $5001 - $1 more than the highest bid on the auction.

Due to the nature of the PR idea, no one could predict how successful the auction would be, but it ended up becoming a raging success.• Both local and worldwide media picked it up, the auction received over 30,000 hits, and bidding reached $5000.• The world’s media picked it up again, bringing our total estimated global exposure to 33 million people.

• This lead to the successful launch of a program that went on to capture over 13,000 souls, resulting in a retail marketing program that’s far more efficient that HELL’s previous letterbox mailer. A soul is 47 times more likely to respond to a HELL EDM than a householder is to a letterbox mailer.• Not bad for a nation of 4 million and considering we spent $0 on media.