Amid weak initial public offerings for gig economy brands including Lyft and Uber, freelancer marketplace Fiverr enlisted DCX to ensure its own IPO was a success. DCX was tasked with creating buzz on Wall Street, educating traders and investors on Fiverr and countering media talk of a “gig economy IPO curse.” 

DCX built on Fiverr’s long-running “In Doers We Trust” campaign that gave it a scrappy, iconoclastic brand image. Keeping that theme, it mobilized Fiverr’s creative community—logo designers, graphic designers and other freelancers—to “take over” the New York Stock Exchange and Wall Street. 

The campaign “defaced” the NYSE with graffiti and prints. It did the same with the Wall Street bull, placing graffiti-covered bull replicas in front of the Stock Exchange. And it gave traders new community designed “uniforms” with bold prints. Fiverr also took over the NYSE social media account and let its creative community reimagine various aspects of the NYSE brand. 

Fiverr’s IPO saw the company’s value grow from $650 million to $1.2 billion. Investors saw the value of their stock increase by 90 percent in several hours. The opening was covered across several outlets and broke the “gig economy IPO curse.”

­­—Luke Guillory