Brief

Visit Snowdonia and its partners were keen to raise their profile and spread awareness of their local attractions with Welsh celebrities acting as influencers and ambassadors of their native regions. Digital Dialog was tasked with enlisting nine celebrities (three from each region) who would be readily identifiable with the regions and with the celebrity status to generate interest in the campaign.

Strategy

We began by identifying prominent personalities from each of the regions and shortlisted those that we felt would be a good fit. This required an awareness of the current Welsh celebrities, their broad appeal and an evaluation of their suitability and availability. This proved to be a detailed task involving delicate negotiations with agents, managers and the celebrities themselves.

Our primary goal was to convince them they could be ambassadors for their regions and our method was to appeal to their sense of regional attachment. We wrote to the selected celebrities suggesting they would be seen as ambassadors for their regions and all we needed was them to choose their top five Welsh locations and experiences. This had the desired effect and we persuaded our selected celebrities to participate without charging fees and with a real sense of patriotic pride.

Celebrities Experiences

The celebrities were asked to either send a short 60 second video or images with text on their top five selections to be used regionally and as part of the overall campaign. As a further help we also created content submission guidelines for the celebrities to follow and we were on hand if they needed any support or guidance during this process.

Once the celebrities were confirmed we drafted terms of engagement and liaised wit h them and their representatives to ensure the deadlines were known and met. Following the initial discussions and agreements, the next stage was to assist them in producing their testimonials for their top five locations and experiences. Digital Dialog liaised with each of the celebrities to ensure they were happy with the process of selecting top attractions and experiences and recording their selections either on video or by email.

Creative

The endorsements were then developed into engaging Facebook canvas ads and tweets that were promoted on social media to over a quarter of a million people in the north-west and midlands region.

The campaign proved to be a great success for the three County Councils providing them with endorsements from Welsh celebrities whose appeal spread across the entertainment, culinary, sporting and business worlds.

 

Results

The campaign received an extremely positive response and was memorable for the celebrity participation. The concentrated effort of sourcing and signing up participation from the nine Welsh celebrities proved to be very productive and beneficial to the overall Year of Legends campaign. Their testimonials were seen by hundreds of thousands across the North West of England and the Midlands reinforcing the appeal of Wales and the profiles of the regions we worked for.