Over $429 million was reported lost due to gift card scams since 2018, and the 2021 holiday season was expected to be the worst year yet for this crime. Additionally, scammers have gotten increasingly sophisticated and complex to increase their effectiveness.

Our client, an online scam resource platform that highlights the latest scams, launched a multi-month creative campaign to spark intergenerational conversations and warn as many people as possible about the prevalence of gift card scams before the holidays – a time when scammers hit the hardest.

Our company was tasked with leading the earned media and influencer portion of the campaign to spark authentic conversation and increase awareness around gift card scams, help combat the stigma around falling for a scam, and educate people on how to spot a scam in order to prevent falling for one.

The creative agency devised a series of dramatized videos featuring the key demographic of those who are common targets for scams. The videos’ scenarios also centered around the most common gift card scam scenarios: you owe the government money, your boss wants you to buy gift cards for the office, your computer has been hacked, you’ve been pre-approved for a loan, or your grandchild is in jail and you need to bail them out. The films remind people that “If someone asks for gift cards to solve a problem, it’s a scam” and points them to our client’s website to educate viewers on tips to prevent themselves from getting scammed.

The videos were also created to help remove the stigma around gift card scams because, although scams affect everyone in some way, they are largely underreported and rarely talked about due to feelings of embarrassment or shame.

Our firm developed a comprehensive, multi-pronged press strategy to designed to maintain momentum in the media throughout the duration of the two-month campaign. We needed to target boomers – the top target for scammers – and millennials – the tech-savvy children or grandchildren who could help educate their loved ones. Our goal was to get boomers and millennials to understand that “if someone asks for gift cards to solve a problem, it’s a scam.”

To accompany the creative videos, our firm conducted a survey on behalf of our client to support our key messaging. In preparation for the launch, we also identified and media trained two key spokespeople from our client’s company who could handle broadcast and print media opportunities as experts in their field. Lastly, we identified and worked with an expert psychiatrist who could add interesting input as to why people are susceptible to fall for scams.

We devised a strategy that created two pulse-points in the media throughout the campaign’s run from Nov. 15 - Dec. 23, 2021. We aimed to spark conversation around the Thanksgiving dinner table, then create another spike in coverage just before Christmas when people were buying gift cards as their last-minute presents. Ahead of the launch, we secured a story with USA Today that kicked off the campaign. On the day of the launch, we released our press release and survey results, which garnered the bulk of our launch week press.

For the second wave of press, we targeted top syndicated broadcast and online outlets throughout November to achieve widespread coverage in early December just ahead of Christmas. We secured an online story with Good Morning America, a Fox Business op-ed penned by our client spokesperson and psychiatrist, a KTLA interview and an Investigative TV interview, achieving ~10-100 syndicated stories per

We took a topic with little public recognition - the extraordinary prevalence of gift card scams - and popularized it on the local and national level. Our goal: increase the understanding of scams amongst boomers and millennials – the groups most affected. We knew 51% of adults over 55 primarily got their news from TV while 64% of millennials’ main news source was digital. Our multi-pronged media approach included training a cybercrime expert for broadcast interviews (~415 hits) and conducting a survey to attract digital coverage (~1,100 hits). The campaign sparked the conversation, which ultimately grew to an average weekly conversation of +172% – averaging 1,100 mentions/week pre-campaign and growing to ~3,000 mentions/week throughout. We earned 4,000 press mentions for our client in all 50 states and 15+ countries. The coverage totaled over 490 million in potential audience reach and $26.8 million in ad value equivalency.