2016 Winners & Shortlists

Brief Explanation

Hiring people is a long and tedious affair for an agency. It is often burdened with randomly sent portfolios and resumes, each from a hopeful candidate eager to join the team. At OgilvyOne, we asked ourselves the question, How can we hire the right people? People who share the same spirit, curiousness and candour that we possess? For our annual intern recruitment exercise, which aims to onboard budding creatives, we decided to give it an unexpected twist.

The Brief

As a way to recruit new and creative talent into the team, OgilvyOne Worldwide Africa staged a unique exercise on it's Facebook page for prospective job seekers. We took advantage of the Halloween holiday and presented an online campaign specifically targeted to attract the right talent into the agency.

How the final design was conceived

We presented the case of the missing creative director who disappeared after a long night at the office. We introduced with 4 suspects: Lila, Vince, Frank and Eva; Each of them had absurd alibis of why they didn't commit the gruesome act. Like any good mystery we left our fans clues in our website, via uniquely prepared photoshop files and scary looking word documents. For the first time ever, all you needed to get a job at OgilvyOne was solve the case of: WHO MURDERED THE CREATIVE DIRECTOR. Over the span of 3 days leading into Halloween, we unleashed clues on our website and our Facebook page. Job seekers only had to visit the website from either their mobile phone or desktop devices and they would find clues specific to their talent: For the artsy detectives, we had clues hidden in Photoshop files. For the copy detectives, we hid the clues in word puzzles, poems and more. Each clue got the conversation going, and with each reveal, the debates became more and more heated, with absurd theories about the killer and sparkling banter about characters in the setting.

Indication of how successful the outcome was in the market

In the end, there were over 40 email responses from hires who had solved the mystery and on Facebook, we had over 100 Facebook messages from fans asking to join the team! Best of all, OgilvyOne succeeded in engaging their audience during the Halloween period and ended up hiring two curious interns.