Do Not Go To CreditKarma.com

Three scripts enter, one script leaves.

Credit Karma held a script write-off in San Francisco. Goodby, Pereira O’Dell, and us at EVB. They wanted a new spokesperson. We went off, wrote, presented and…

My script lived. With Credit Karma’s blessing, we took that script and blew it out into a whole campaign.

The insight? A free credit score is powerful because there are powerful people profiting from you not having one. You’ve got the rent-to-own folks, the payday lenders, the guy at the dealership who has seen your kind before, the exec whose company mails you credit card offers for the low low APR of way too much.

The fastest way to make people love a brand is to show them exactly who hates it.

So we imagined someone who’d hate Credit Karma, and developed an advocacy campaign against our own client.

A strong villain thinks he’s right.

That’s the trick when creating a character like this. He believes what he’s saying. Let him in on the joke, show your hand, and the illusion collapses. So “Confusion,” as we colloquially called him, believes in his gold-plated heart that he’s the wronged party. How dare Credit Karma get between him and his soft-earned cash?

“Don’t go to CreditKarma.com. Go to my site, DoNotGoToCreditKarmaDotCom.com.”

The website was both a punchline and an easter egg. We wanted to reward curious viewers, so we actually built the parody advocacy site.

Inside a month it was among the 92,000 most visited websites in America. Out of roughly three hundred million. Not bad for a fake website.

We stuffed the site with “Confusion’s” world view: his top 5 reasons not to check your credit score for free. A fundraiser for his third favorite vacation island. A downloadable ringtone.

This campaign became the most successful campaign Credit Karma had run to that point. Which is kind of wild, when the whole campaign tells folks to not visit Credit Karma.