Pranking Amazon and Saving the Independent American Bookstore

For the American Booksellers Association, we took on Amazon and Prime Day by covering independent bookstore front windows, awnings, displays, and sidewalks with what looked like Amazon boxes. The boxes were printed with anti-Amazon headlines, and to create scale on a limited budget, we chose six stores in key media locations - NYC, DC, LA - for the full immersive experience, and shipped posters and DIY kits to hundreds of other stores to participate in a coordinated activation nationwide. 

 The campaign started on Twitter with a series of tweets we sent from the bookstores’ accounts announcing the “protest” organized with the hashtag #BoxedOut. On the days of the activation, we geo-targeted our tweets to readers within 10 miles of each bookstore, encouraging them to visit and buy. We captured the activations in real-time and seeded assets to the press, specifically targeting local journalists and authors we believed sympathetic to the cause. 

 We set out to generate awareness, drive traffic and get people to buy local. 

 Awareness: We generated 4.5B media impressions, most of those earned. Searches for “bookstore near me” spiked 115% during the campaign and average search volume has sustained at 50% increase to this day.

 Traffic: ABA bookstores consolidate all e-commerce at bookshop.org. Average site visits prior to #BoxedOut were 2M per month. We doubled that. And not just the days around the activation. Six months AFTER and site traffic continues at 4M visits per month. 

 Sales: Before our campaign, the ABA projected that 1 in 4 bookstores were in danger of closing before year's end. That didn’t happen. In fact, only 1% of stores were actually forced to close. And stores such as McNally Jackson, Greenlight, and Raven reported their biggest sales day ever. We actually stopped paid social earlier than scheduled because demand outweighed supply at some stores.