J. Walter Thompson Brazil Helps NGOs Nab Free YouTube Ad Space with “Donate the Bars” Campaign

To many of us, the ads that pop up while we’re aimlessly browsing YouTube are, to put it nicely, a nuisance. But to many NGOs with limited resources for advertising, gaining ad space on a platform that garners 4 billion video views each day is something like a dream.

J. Walter Thompson Brazil’s recently launched “Doe as Barras” (“Donate the Bars”) project found a clever way to match YouTube’s booming ad program with NGOs’s need for spaces to publicize their missions and social initiatives.

Leveraging the two black bars that sandwich vertically recorded YouTube videos, the team created www.doeasbarras.com.br, a website that allows users to upload square or vertical videos and donate the surrounding black space as media space for a non-profit.

NGOs like Alcoólicos Anônimos, AMPARA Animal, AfroReggae, Associação Brasil Parkinson, Gravidez Sem Álcool, and Instituto Ayrton Senna have flocked to the “Doe as Barras,” seizing the opportunity their limited budgets had kept from them: to amplify the visibility of their organizations and their efforts on a paid media platform.

Here, J. Walter Thompson Brazil has found an innovative way to, quite literally, think outside of the box and transform what others might have seen as unusable space into a media outlet dedicated to spreading awareness of NGOs and their important social causes.

— Read more about “Donate the Bars” on Adweek, Creativity Online, and LBB.