PHD Belgium won Silver and an Excellence in Media Use special award at the Effie Awards Belgium for their work with SBS Belgium on the ‘WtFOCK’ campaign; it was also the highest-scoring campaign of the entire Awards.
In a first in the history of the Effie Awards Belgium, the 2020 edition ended without any Gold. Four Silver and nine Bronze were awarded, as well as five Mentions of Excellence in Media Use.
PHD Belgium’s winning campaign, WtFOCK is a web-series broadcast on SBS Belgium platforms depicting the daily life of a group of students. The strategy was to blur the lines between fiction and reality by encouraging the participation and commitment of the ‘woke generation’. The characters in the series interacted as in ‘real life’, via their social networks, with influencers referring to these characters directly on their Instagram pages. Fans were also pushed to become real ambassadors of the series by encouraging them to react on the WtFOCK Instagram page.
Between 2018 and 2019, the number of series viewers rose from 116,000 to 411,000, exploding the campaign goals by 64%, with almost half from the 15–24 age group. The number of views also exceeded expectations by 53% to 12.6 million, and the number of subscribers on the WtFOCK page reached 145,000 (45% above target). Finally, WtFOCK was the most popular term in Google Belgium searches in 2019.
For details of all EFFIE Belgium 2020 Silver winners, click here.
