13th January 2021

The Vilnius Model: How to keep people smiling

In The Spotlight

Vilnius caught the attention of the world with their innovative strategies to support their citizens and businesses throughout the pandemic. After winning the 2020 City Nation Place Award for Best Communication Strategy, we reached out to the Director of Go Vilnius, Inga Romanovskiene, to understand more about their place branding strategy - and to discover the secret to using humour successfully in your marketing.

Thank you for joining us, Inga. We're excited to hear more about your winning campaign, "Vilnius: Amazing Wherever You Think It Is." First though, I was hoping to speak to you about the amazing initiatives Vilnius launched during the pandemic to support residents and businesses alike. Is there a single project that you are particularly proud of?

The onset of the coronavirus pandemic and the subsequent lockdown last March inspired the broader community in Vilnius to look for ways to turn challenges into opportunities to help each other and the city survive amid a period of uncertainty. This took on many forms, including a local photographer who exchanged his tripod for a drone to keep taking family portraits during quarantine and Vilnius International Airport transforming one of its aprons to accommodate a drive-in cinema. Then, the municipality of Vilnius approached restaurant owners with an extraordinary proposal to use the entire city as an open-air café to maintain safe distance and keep businesses in the city alive.

The pandemic impacted everyone around the world, making for an experience that we all had in common. In this sense, we knew that initiatives in Vilnius aimed at responding to the crisis could be relevant, inspirational and helpful to other cities and communities around the world while simultaneously furthering our long-term objective of raising awareness about the city abroad. So, during the height of the first lockdown, we continued doing our job – sharing stories from Vilnius with the world.