The Most Transparent Campaign

The Addys, the American Advertising Federation’s award show, are judged purely on merit, no big budgets, no big brands, just the work. I wanted a stunt that proved the point: two people in hazmat suits, carrying an enormous, completely invisible sheet of glass through the streets of D.C.

The Experiment:

I came up with the idea, a grown-up version of a prank I ran as a kid in Spain, stopping traffic by pretending to search for a lost contact lens on the pavement. Turns out “pretend something invisible is there” still works on adults in D.C. I talked Tony Kosack, then principal at Ko-op Media, a small local production company, into shooting it with me.

The Reactions:

One shoot day, real strangers, no script. I oversaw the edit with the Salta team, cutting the footage into 15 short videos built for YouTube Shorts and Reels.

The idea held up: one shoot day produced 16 native videos, then we turned the two best-performing hooks into a lead-gen engine, eight A/B-tested ad variations feeding straight into a TikTok-native application form.

Animated GIF with people reacting to the glass being transported through the streets of D.C

Results

500,000

Organic Views

0

Spent

🏆

A Shorty Award in the “On a Shoestring” category.