No room for ego: How classifieds works with 9 Agencies collaborates

Giving an established company a new name is no walk in the park. How Iskra Velichkova, brand owner of the online platform Classifieds, orchestrated a far-reaching change together with her lead agency The Goodwins - and brought a host of service providers into line in the process.

If you're a student in need of a new desk and don't have a large budget, you'll want to check out those Internet sites where you can find just about anything at a reasonable price, and sometimes even for free. We're talking about Ebay Classifieds, with over 37 million unique users (as of March 2023) the most frequently used service on the web. To keep it that way, it wasn't just technicians and product managers who were called upon in recent months. In the marketing department, too, preparations for the most far-reaching change in the company's history have been in full swing: Ebay Classifieds has been history since mid-May. Instead, buyers and sellers can now find what they are looking for under Classifieds.

Behind it is a feat of strength. "Renaming Ebay Classifieds to Classifieds requires extensive measures to remain findable for search engines," says Iskra Velichkova, who is responsible for the brand as Head of Brand. "In addition, customers need to recognize and find us again despite the new URL - we're making sure of that with the awareness campaign."

Users were curious

From Velichkova's perspective, the math worked out. "Around the launch," says the brand expert, "there was the highest traic on the site since the pandemic. We made people curious." The platform's users were informed thanks to a prelaunch campaign played out on many channels, and were thus able to face the upcoming changes with apparent peace of mind. "We had to prepare users as well as possible in the prelaunch so that they would find the app again and recognize the new logo," explains Velichkova - plenty of work, then, for the client and the agencies involved in the project. In the middle of 2022 Ebay Kleinanzeigen had invited to the pitch and thus completed the first step of the rebranding campaign planned this year. The winner of the multi-stage selection process and thus the lead agency is the Berlin-based creative agency The Goodwins, which became active for Ebay Kleinanzeigen for the first time in 2019.

For the new brand presence, the agency developed a campaign (claim: "Classifieds, big impact") that celebrates users of the platform as "secondhand heroes and brings the topic of sustainability to the fore. It was on this path, the interest in sustainability, that the client and the agency also came together in 2019. "All of a sudden, there were two companies interested in the same thing," reports Tim Stübane, one of the co-founders of the agency, which was founded in 2018. The two business partners were not complete strangers, however: Stübane and Velichkova are united by a shared agency time at DBB in Berlin.

Corona time has steeled

As the lead agency, The Goodwins pulled the strings when Ebay Kleinanzeigen was renamed Kleinanzeigen. However, this obviously did not amount to a demonstration of power. "We didn't take a hard line there," says Stübane. "Our goal was just to make sure that the common thread of the campaign was maintained." Hand in hand, then, instead of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. The big advantage was that most of the agencies involved had known each other for a while. More precisely since 2020 when the first campaign ("Let's trade") for Ebay Kleinanzeigen was created in the Corona era. "That was the baptism of fire," emphasizes Stübane - because the restrictions in place at the time had also served to strengthen the sense of togetherness.

According to the Berlin-based creative expert, mutual respect and shared values were the cornerstones of the collaboration between The Goodwins, Gud (social media), Essence Mediacom (media), Fischer Appelt (PR), Klein aber (Youtube), Gen-Up (Tiktok), Moccu (UX), Crsd (dialog marketing) and Mutabor (design/CI).

Ego maintenance at the expense of others was not the order of the day in this project. "The meetings were not about showing that you can do it and that the others are worse. The goal was to have a good idea, and that's what everyone worked on," reports Philipp Bertisch, who was responsible for the classifieds campaign on the part of The Goodwins as Creative Director Art.

Of course, there was criticism

The mutual tolerance even went so far that not every agency stuck to its last. For example, the digital specialists from Gud presented designs for the out-of-home presence, which were then approved by the assembled group. Conversely, says Iskra Velichkova, The Goodwins made the YouTube films. "We realized in this project how important it is to have partners who share the same values," sums up the brand expert. Nevertheless, the collaboration was a challenge. "Of course, it's not easy to sit at the same table with so many agencies and also comment on designs that are not so successful," Velichkova admits. In this case, she says, it's then important to find the right tone so that no one feels upstaged and is motivated to continue working on the project. According to the results so far, the effort has paid off. In May, the online marketplace was named "Advertiser of the month," a title awarded by the market research institute Yougov in conjunction with the trade magazine Absatzwirtschaft and based on the advertising awareness measured during this period. According to the data determined as part of the Brand Index, ad awareness rose by almost eight percentage points in May; the highest value was measured on May 20. And there's another point that's important to the agency and client when looking at the joint project: resources were conserved in the production of the campaign. "Everyone made sure that production was as environmentally friendly as possible," emphasizes Clemens Kandziora, Creative Director Text. The campaign was shot on the company's doorstep, in Berlin, with a local director and actors who were also mostly from the region. Those who could came by bike or public transport - the days when advertisers could get a guilty conscience when looking at the eco-balance of their work also seem to be over by now.