How the City of Linz leveraged Colossyan’s AI Avatars to inform their multicultural population

How a city in Austria used digital vaccination consultants to educate its population

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About the City of Linz

Linz is a city in Upper Austria with a population of around 205,000. With a large foreign population, it’s important for the city to communicate clearly on healthcare with its citizens in multiple languages.

The Challenge

The city of Linz was charged with implementing a municipal vaccination campaign, its goal being to set itself apart from both the federal and state campaigns that were running at the time. 

Receiving funds from the federal government totalling €1.9 million, Linz decided to take an innovative approach to reach and communicate more easily with its citizens.

"The communication goal of the municipal vaccination campaign is to reach as many people as possible with our information, to reduce uncertainties and to answer questions competently.” - Magistrate Ulrike Huemer

Key Problems

Uncertainty about the Coronavrius vaccines was widespread among the Linz population. On top of this, approximately 28% of the city’s population is foreign-born. Linz had to approach its target groups consciously and provide information in a way that was easy to understand.

“The focus of the campaign is clearly on the people of Linz, which was precisely planned when targeting the target groups. This not only enables us to reach exactly those people with our advertising measures for whom the content is relevant and to keep wastage low, but also creates a clear differentiation from vaccination campaigns in other municipalities as well as the federal and state governments of Upper Austria."  - Mag. Dr. Jürgen Tröbinger, director of the city's communication and marketing department

The Solution

Digital vaccination advisors - created with Colossyan’s technology and actors- are the stars of Linz’s vaccination campaign, offering low threshold, multilingual information

With the collaboration of city administrators and health experts, marketing and communication, and the agency Digital Hunter and Colossyan, the concept for Linz’s campaign was born. Using an omni-channel campaign that included online, print and radio, the city was able to direct its citizens to find the correct information.

The idea was to create an interactive platform where citizens could enter a website to seek out information about the vaccine. As soon as a visitor lands on the page and clicks play, they’re given 11 language options to choose from.

That’s when the digital characters - also known as avatars - take over the conversation in the selected language. The visitor can then select from a series of frequently asked questions (FAQs) on the subject of Covid vaccination.

“With the use of the digital vaccination consultants, the city of Linz is taking another important step in the direction of digitization. Because it is about making urban information offers as easily accessible as possible for all citizens.”  - Magistrate Director Ulrike Huemer

Wins

The city of Linz was able to finance the campaign thanks to generous federal funding. The city projected to spend less than half of its €1.9 million budget.

• Linz furthered their digital possibilities and can continue to implement technology into their future communication
• The city created helpful, multilingual information to educate its citizens
• Using synthetic actors allowed the city to engage its population in a more optimized and personal way 

It is clear that the advantages of implementing synthetic actors into their campaign were colossal for the city. Instead of hiring multiple actors to create content in 11 different languages and spending money on studios and post-production costs, they were able to create meaningful video content at a fraction of the cost.

The money that was left could be used to react to any changes in the Covid situations and to compensate for inflation. A win-win situation for the municipality as well as its citizens.