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New Vilnius campaign will invite Brits, Germans to break stereotypes

Vilnius is set to launch a new advertising campaign in the UK and Germany next week, worth around 0.5 million euros, and will invite people in the two countries to break stereotypes about the Lithuanian capital.

With this new campaign, entitled “Expectations vs Reality” and starting April 8, Vilnius will try to shake off the label of a “former Soviet country”.

“60 percent of people in the UK and 40 percent of residents of Germany don’t know Vilnius. (…) And of those who know it, 25 percent only know the name. (…) If you don’t know what’s so fascinating about the city, what can you do there?” Dovile Aleksandraviciene, head of Go Vilnius, said at the launch of the new campaign on Thursday.

A study carried out this year by the KOG Institute for Marketing and Communication Sciences found that only 8 percent of people in the UK and Germany know more than the name of Vilnius or have more than basic geographic knowledge. Most of them associate Vilnius with Eastern European stereotypes and poverty, Aleksandraviciene said.

“What does the UK associate Vilnius with? It’s Russia – 10 percent, (…) we see the same in Germany as 17 percent think we are a post-Soviet country in a bad way,” she added.

59 percent of Britons and 50 percent of Germans would like to come back to Vilnius again.

One of the highlights of the campaign is a video in which a British man sees an invitation to come to Vilnius in a newspaper and starts imagining all sorts of stereotypical images, such as a man urinating on the wall of a wooden house and turning around to say hello, or a mother and her child riding in a wagon with straw. Later, the British man is shown images of contemporary Vilnius.

Aleksandraviciene admits that such advertising is very bold, but added that earlier research proved its effectiveness as 53 percent of Germans and 49 percent of Britons saw it and started looking for more information about Vilnius, while 36 percent Germans and 49 percent of Britons wanted to learn more about the culture and history of Vilnius, and 27 percent and 30 percent wanted to make plans for a trip to the Lithuanian capital.

The new campaign will be funded by the city’s tourist tax, the GO Vilnius head said.

Source: BNS

(Reproduction of BNS information in mass media and other websites without written consent of BNS is prohibited.)

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