Ogilvy - Pirate Recruitment - (2012) case study

Ogilvy decided to find a new web designer.. by placing a 6.8 MB file out on Torret sites with the name "adobe photoshop"

Yep.

Now, if we ignore the dumb that is a person who believes that 6.8 MB file contains photoshop... The idea itself isn't new at all. Various sleezier businesses (yes there are businesses worse than advertising) have long employed the bait&switch on file-sharing sites to advertise their products, spread their trojan viruses and generally muck things up. Why, back in the "American Life" days of 2003 Madonna dropped sound files with the recording "what the fuck do you think you're doing?" all over the web, thereby flooding the network with silence instead if her pirated album.

And way back in the 90s, when Adland 'lived' on a shared server together with a porn site, the porn-site owner used to drop files of popular music all around the web with his URL in it, tempting traffic to come see his porn.

In short, the idea isn't that brilliant guys. But I'm glad yo found someone to hire.

ad agency: Ogilvy