Christmas shoppers spend hours buying gifts for their family and friends in busy shopping centres with queues and crowds and although they intend to get their christmas shopping done 4-8 weeks before Christmas, they often lack gift-spiration.On the other hand, boutique merchants struggle to compete with the sales and advertising budgets of established retailers.

By connecting interesting, unique merchants with PayPal customers, these pain points can be minimised.

The challenge was to drive digital transactions with PayPal by creating an emotional connection with consumers and merchants, during the intensely competitive Christmas retail period.

- Increase overall transactions and payment volume

- Increase average transactions across 6.7 million active accounts from 28.9 to 30.8 by December year-end 2016.

- Campaign to generate 1.17 million transactions, $79.85 million in payment volume and $2.36 million in revenue.

- Increase Brand Consideration.

At the heart of the campaign was the SOTBP hub. As well as featuring over 150 local Aussie merchants, the hub enabled consumers searching for inspiration to discover unique gifts via the most popular gifting search terms during the time period (such as bespoke, adventurous, and trending) rather than the standard ‘for him/for her’ categorisation.

To populate the hub, we invited PayPal-enabled businesses to join the campaign before launch. Over and above the 150+ unique merchants were able to feature, a further thousand downloaded a digital toolkit to feature campaign assets in their comms.

Launching in October, we were able to be top of mind for consumers during Black Friday and Cyber Monday - and then ran through to mid-January to capitalise on the post-Christmas sales.

To spread the word, the campaign utilised Facebook Carousels, Canvas and video, as well as Youtube pre-rolls, display, owned assets and an eBay partnership.