Phone re-seller targets Apple Stores with Airdrop ads /

According to recent research from the French Environment and Energy Management Agency (Ademe), choosing a refurbished smartphone instead of a new one is 91% less impactful in terms of CO2 emissions, and refurbishing a smartphone requires 91% less raw material and 82% less water than producing a new one. Refurbishing rather than purchasing new smartphones also generates 88% less e-waste.

On Earth Day (22 April 2022), Back Market, the French ecommerce platform that connects trusted refurbishment factories with consumers, teamed up with Paris-based agency Marcel for Hack Market. The guerilla campaign was designed to convince those who were about to buy a new device to choose a secondhand model instead.

Using an Apple feature called Airdrop, which enables Apple device users to send each other files using close-range wireless communication, Back Market broadcast messages to Apple devices in six stores in Paris, Berlin and London. Stationed outside the Apple stores, Back Market was able to Airdrop 4,000 messages to customers browsing the display devices.

Those who accepted the Airdrop request (which appeared as a pop-up message reading, ‘“Back Market” would like to share the website “backmarket.co.uk”’) were served messages like ‘This iPhone 12 comes in pink, blue, black and greener. Switch to refurbished’ and ‘The iPhone you love without the carbon footprint you hate. Switch to refurbished’. The user could then click through to the Back Market website, where they could find a cheaper refurbished model of the product they were considering.

‘On one of the agency’s walls, there is this quote by [Publicis Groupe founder] Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet,’ said Clément Séchet, creative director at Marcel, in a campaign press release. ‘“At some point, you have to stop being reasonable and dare.” So we decided to go further than a traditional campaign by creating a new medium: the display models in the Apple Stores in Paris, Berlin and London. We designed messages to convince customers in the “temple of new” about the huge difference between refurbished and new, which then redirected them to the Back Market website.’