Playful videos win praise for Lithuania and Vilnius at CIFFT Circuit Awards

The innovative tourism advertising campaigns are toying with the country’s distinctive colours and the capital’s alleged obscurity

The efforts of Lithuania and its capital city to showcase their unique tourist appeal have received yet another international recognition. As reported by the Vilnius City website, the videos headlining the national and the city’s tourism advertising campaigns have just won the top prizes in their categories at the CIFFT Circuit World’s Best Tourism Film Awards.

Since 1989, the International Committee of Tourism Film Festivals (CIFFT) has collected the world's best video clips ranked by country, city, region, tourism products and services. This year, 1,300 participants from more than 90 countries took part in 13 intermediate festivals. The best entries were selected by a panel of experts in the fields of tourism, audiovisual arts and marketing.

Get to know Lithuania through colours

Launched in June 2020, the national Discover colours you never knew existed campaign encourages travellers to discover Lithuania through unusual colours which are nevertheless distinctive of local architecture and cuisine. These are Cold Pink (the colour attributed to the national šaltibarščiai soup), Vilnius Rooftop Red, Kaunas Modernism Grey, Amber Yellow, Baltic Blue, Deep Forest Green, and Rye Bread Black.

For the campaign, Lithuania Travel, the country's Tourism Development Agency, has teamed up with the creative agency "Wide Wings". The campaign’s promotional video clip (watch it in our Video Gallery above) has received many accolades, including the top prize at the Japanese World Tourism Film Festival Grand Prix, gold awards at festivals in Turkey, Croatia, Latvia, Poland, Serbia, as well as silver at the Cannes Corporate Media & TV Awards.

Pinpoint Vilnius on the map

The playful and inventive campaign Vilnius: amazing wherever you think it is has been created by Go Vilnius, the city’s tourism & business development agency, in collaboration with the creative agency "Bechtle and Milzarajs". The promotional video clip pokes fun of Vilnius’ alleged obscurity, quizzing foreigners on the city’s location and receiving diverse answers – all of them wrong.

The video clip has won 3 Grand Prix awards and other top prizes at world tourism festivals in the United States, Japan, Germany, Spain, South Africa, Turkey, Greece, Serbia and Croatia.

Breaking with tourist stereotypes

“We are glad that the advertisements promoting Lithuania and Vilnius received such a significant recognition not only from tourists, but also from industry professionals. We hope that this achievement at the world level will not only encourage further our creative potential, but will also help us to achieve our main goal - attracting more tourists to Lithuania,” says Dalius Morkvėnas, Director of Lithuania Travel.

According to Inga Romanovskienė, the head of Go Vilnius, the aim of both agencies is to consistently increase the awareness of the uniqueness of Lithuania, putting the country on the must-visit list despite the pandemic challenges.

"I believe that the success of our advertising campaign has been preconditioned by the sincerity of Vilnius, the openness with which we show that we are not afraid to look at ourselves with humour and break with established traditions,” says Romanovskienė.