As Belfast’s high street, outdoor spaces, hospitality places and tourist spots started to reopen, internal communications from Belfast ‘city centre champions’ Belfast One reported consumer confidence was extremely low post lockdown and people having increased reservations about returning to the city centre. Belfast One needed to re-establish consumer confidence by making the public aware of the steps local businesses had taken to ensure their safety whilst out and about in the city centre, and they partnered with Belfast’s main media platform to do just that.

The whole campaign was purely designed for social play. Initially, we went out with an Instagram survey in an Insta Story format to Belfast Live’s 69k followers to gain insights into the public's current perception of the city centre and what the mood was like for getting out and about again in Belfast. Had the city centre done enough to entice people back into the city centre? Reasons as to why they would go back into the city centre...the Eat out to Help out Scheme maybe, or retail? From this, we would get valuable, real-time content that would enable us to storyboard videos that we could then push out to readers. We shot two videos focussing on the retail and hospitality Belfast has to offer post-Covid, showing IRL, what measures they had put in place for customers to reinforce the message that Belfast is very much open for business again and it’s safe to come back.

The 24-hour Instagram survey delivered 59,518 impressions and gathered 9,126 votes/responses. Each video was shared on Twitter and Instagram to ensure great shared reach via social. On Twitter, the videos appeared over 14,224 times on peoples' feeds and were watched 3,939 times. Almost 500 people liked/tweeted/retweeted the videos to their followers as well. Over on Instagram, we published the videos in our stories and they delivered over 21k impressions and got 250+ reactions/comments etc., further boosting the social scale of this campaign that was designed purely for social.  The x2 videos got in the region of 163.1k views with a combined watch time of 7,000 minutes!