Title	STALKER VIEWED YOUR PROFILE
Brand	SBS BELGIUM
Product/Service	STALKER
Category	B01. Use of Social Platforms
Entrant Company	BBDO BELGIUM Brussels, BELGIUM
Advertising Agency	BBDO BELGIUM Brussels, BELGIUM

Name	Company	Position
Jan Dejonghe	Bbdo Belgium	Creative Director
Sebastien De Valck	Bbdo Belgium	Creative Director
Arnaud Pitz	Bbdo Belgium	creative director
Jutta Callebaut	Bbdo Belgium	Creative Copywriter
Lore Desmet	Bbdo Belgium	Account Manager
Isabel Peeters	Bbdo Belgium	Chief Commercial Officer
Jasper Heldenbergh	Bbdo Belgium	videographer
Julie Bogaerts	Bbdo Belgium	social strategy

Brief Explanation

With a market share of 14,4% ‘Vier’ is a smaller Belgian TV channel. To snatch some market share of the bigger market players, they need low-budget, clever word-of-mouth campaigns. They wanted to increase their market share on Sunday Evenings. We created a fictional LinkedIn profile for ‘Stalker’ and stalked as many people as possible, simply by viewing their profile. All those people received a notification that a 'Stalker' had viewed their profile. When the victims had a look back at the profile of Stalker they found all the broadcast info, an exclusive trailer and some personal yet very disturbing details.

Results and Effectiveness

‘Stalker’ viewed about 12,000 other LinkedIn profiles. 63% of those people got curious and viewed Stalker’s profile in return. Without having a Twitter account of his own, ‘Stalker’ organically generated around 27,600 Twitter impressions. The Stalker-campaign created a raise in the market share of 2,9%. The market share went up from 14.4% to 17.3%. Vier was able to snatch some of the market share of the bigger market players. A great result for a campaign without any budget foreseen. The première received its attention thanks to the target audience that actively shared screenshots and quotes from the Stalker profile.

Creative Execution

Our campaign run starting from the 17th of november, the week before the première of Stalker. We created a fictional Stalker-profile and stalked as many people as possible by viewing their profiles on LinkedIn. After one day, LinkedIn already removed the ‘Stalker’-profile. That didn’t hold our social media team back, we started creating even more profiles and kept on watching peoples profiles. LinkedIn kicked off about 9 of our Stalker-profiles. Our 'victims' reacted the way we hoped they would, they shared screenshots of our campaign on their own social media. And created buzz for the première of Stalker.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

The wide target audience of VIER are Dutch speaking Belgians aged 18 to 54. The bigger part of the target audience are higher educated people. They are both loyal and critical to VIER. They are active on social media like Facebook, but also on Twitter and LinkedIn. They have a wide interest, are clever and have a good sense of humour. This supports our choice for the LinkedIn application, but also the fact that nobody expects advertising for a new thriller series on LinkedIn, certainly not in this way. The professional context of LinkedIn favoured the surprise-effect of our campaign.