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 also supports our choice for the LinkedIn application, since it is being used in a professional business environment.

A personal approach was needed to make this campaign work. In order to create a real stalker-feeling, the campaign even had to be a little bit too personal. We visited as many people’s profiles on LinkedIn as possible. All the persons whose profile was viewed received a notification from LinkedIn that a certain ‘Stalker’ had viewed their profile. We visited the personal professional LinkedIn profiles of the target group, this way they felt directly spoken to. Apart from feeling slightly scared, the target group also felt honored, that a TV channel, chose their personal profile to visit.

LinkedIn is known as a business network. Yet, it also has a creepy side: the ‘who’s viewed your profile’ feature. We used this functionality to announce the launch of ‘Stalker’.

We created a fictional LinkedIn profile for ‘Stalker’ and stalked as many people as possible, simply by viewing their profile. All those people directly received a notification that a certain 'Stalker' had viewed their personal 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.

After one day, LinkedIn removed the ‘Stalker’-profile. But that didn’t hold us back, we created even more profiles and kept on creating new Stalker profiles each time LinkedIn kicked us off.

The professional context of LinkedIn was in nice contrast with the entertainment level of the Stalker-campaign.

The ‘Stalker-viewed your profile’-campaign was meant as word-of-mouth as a direct marketing approach on top of the classic bannering in the papers. ‘Stalker’ viewed about 12,000 different LinkedIn profiles. 63% 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. 'Stalker' had a market share of 17,3% on the Flemish Belgian television which is 2,9% higher than the average program on VIER.

VIER is one of the smallest tv channels in Belgium. It’s positioned as a channel with a good sense of humor and appeals a well-educated public. Their average market share is 14,4 %.

On Sunday evenings VIER broadcasts various crime series like ‘Castle’, ‘The Blacklist’ or ‘Elementary’ in succession. VIER added ‘Stalker’ to the schedule. In order to get attention for the première of ‘Stalker’, they wanted to reach their target group in a new, direct way and create big buzz with a tiny budget. This way VIER hoped to snatch some market share of the bigger market players.