• by Amy Corr  @MediaPostOTL, July 8, 2016

How do you advertise on a platform that doesn't allow advertising? You hack it... for a good cause. WATERisLIFE, a charity that provides clean drinking water to countries in need, and its agency Deutsch, hacked Venmo, a digital wallet where users can exchange payments with friends. The Venmo Micro Hack was conceived as a way to show Millennials that donating to charity can be simple and possible without an enormous ad budget. On July 4, Deutsch monitored Venmo's public global news feed, determined what people were paying for, clicked their name, sent them a micro payment and then used the entire 2,000-character caption to create real-time targeted ads. People who were paying each other back for anything from a slice of pizza to a movie ticket received a micro payment with captions like: "1 cent can't buy you pizza. But for just 3 cents, you can buy someone clean water for a day." Ads were then published to that person's news feed for all their friends to see it, along with Venmo's global feed, allowing all app users to see it. In 24 hours, 1,000 people received the ads disguised as payment descriptions, which cost the charity $10. Creativity on a budget. WATERisLIFE published all of the micro ads to its website, so that anyone can use them to "hack" Venmo and spread the charity's message .