Title	THE TOURING TOURIST
Brand	PROVINCE OF ANTWERP
Product/Service	PUBLIC SERVICES
Category	A10. Integrated Campaign led by Content Platform
Entrant Company	DE VLOER Antwerp, BELGIUM
Contributing Company	DE VLOER Antwerp, BELGIUM
Contributing Company 2	PROPHETS Antwerp, BELGIUM

Name	Company	Position
Koen Van Deun	De Vloer	Creative director
Johan Roelandt	De Vloer	Creative director
Daan Richard	Prophets	Strategy
Véronique Beutels	Prophets	Account Manager
Paul Hendrickx	Province of Antwerp	DIRECTEUR MARKETING/COMMUNICATIE
Fatima Fadili	Province of Antwerp	project leader
Raf Vorsselmans	Province of Antwerp	designer
Geertrui Vanhooydonck	Province of Antwerp	webdevelopment
Hilde Verhelst	Province of Antwerp	PR
Sam Vanallemeersch	Freelance	Illustrator

The Campaign

Challenge The province of Antwerp had to promote its range of summer activities to its inhabitants on a shoestring budget, with hardly any media. To make matters worse, most Belgians are more excited about summer activities abroad than those close to home. Idea. We skipped the usual poster campaign and used our budget to have someone experience with fresh eyes. Someone very new to the whole concept. We invited an unknown Chinese girl, Zhao Dandan, from across the globe to become our Touring Tourist. Dandan’s mission: to experience every event the province had to offer and talk, blog, tweet and instagram about it to the rest of Antwerp. Each night Dandan was hosted by a different local family. Which not only gave her a more genuine experience but strongly increased the reach of the campaign on social media. Looking for host families also gave us a great teasing run-up to the actual campaign, Response Instead of an ad campaign we told the story of a young girl visiting a strange country, and managed to get every single Flemish media outlet to report on her arrival and her leaving the country. Most of them kept on reporting many times during her month long stay. Dandan became more and more popular. People checked her website and activities to find out where they could meet her. This positive feedback loop resulted in the campaign growing bigger than the intended provincial target audience with Dandan getting her own segment in a travel show on National Television and her meeting the Belgian royal family. Results In the end our campaign managed to reach 65% of all inhabitants, with a whopping 86% liking it and 69% attributing all the events to the province itself. A result we never would've gotten through normal advertising means.

As stated before, the campaign went far beyond the inhabitants of the province of Antwerp as target audience. National media reported on her journey several times, proposed and arranged a segment for her in Belgium's most popular travel tv-show and she ended up meeting the royal family. In the end our campaign managed to reach 65% of all inhabitants, with a whopping 86% liking it and 69% attributing all the events to the province itself. A result we never would have achieved which your average media reach (pretty much zero considering the budget) and without the storytelling content strategy. Don't believe us? If you're judging in Antwerp, go out and ask some of the people you meet about "Dandan, de Chinese Toerende Toerist" (our Chinese Touring Toerist)

To get the inhabitants of our province excited about its events again, we invited a pair of fresh eyes, an unknown Chinese girl, Zhao Dandan from across the globe to become our Touring Tourist. We used this as the basis for our branded content story. Dandan’s mission: to experience every single event the province had to offer and talk, blog, tweet and instagram about it to the rest of Antwerp. Each night of her stay Dandan was hosted by a different local family. The content Dandan provided was picked up by all major media in Flanders with Dandan’s trip even ending as a segment in a popular travel show. Her journey was broadcasted several times as news as well. On radio, TV and in newspaper. Instead of the requested ad campaign, we told the story of a girl visiting our province for the first time.