How Austrian Tourism Turned Influencer Burnout Into a Travel Campaign
Austrian National Tourist Board's #iamAUT campaign, launched in summer 2024 by Wien Nord Serviceplan, invited prominent European influencers to take genuine social-media-free vacations across Austria while handing their accounts to everyday Austrians — dubbed AUTfluencers — who shared authentic local culture with a combined audience of over 4.1 million followers, as reported by Contagious.
The campaign launched in June 2024, timed deliberately to the start of the summer travel season in Austria. Rather than commissioning polished content from well-known creators, the Austrian National Tourist Board inverted the standard influencer marketing model entirely. Each participating influencer surrendered their smartphone and their posting schedule, ceding creative control to a local Austrian whose only brief was to share genuine everyday life. The result was an unusually candid window into Austrian culture — food, landscape, regional customs — delivered through channels that audiences already followed and trusted.
Four influencers anchored the initial wave of the initiative. German lifestyle creator xLaeta began her offline vacation in Salzburg, the city of Mozart, while AUTfluencer Lieselotte managed her account and placed Austrian food culture at the centre of her content. Italian influencer Giulia Lamarca unplugged in Schladming. Polina Burashnikova, based in the Netherlands, retreated to Seefeld in Tyrol, and Czech influencer Jitka Novackova spent her offline break at Lake Traunsee, in Upper Austria. Each destination was chosen to demonstrate the geographic range of Austria as a travel destination — from Alpine ski towns to lakeside landscapes to historic cities.
Sandra Stichauner, CMO of Austria Tourism, described the dual ambition of #iamAUT plainly: to draw attention to social media pressure as a genuine cultural issue while simultaneously showcasing Austria's diverse regions as destinations suited to digital detox, according to reporting by Little Black Book Online. The campaign did not ask audiences to abandon social media permanently — it asked them to notice what a break might feel like, with Austria as the setting for that pause.
Wien Nord Serviceplan identified social media burnout as the central consumer tension the #iamAUT campaign could credibly address. The strategic insight was straightforward: if the people most visibly exhausted by the obligation to post are influencers themselves, then giving them a real holiday carries both cultural resonance and media novelty. For the Austrian National Tourist Board, this framing positioned Austria not as a destination competing on attractions or price, but as a remedy for a condition that millions of travellers — and the creators they follow — recognise in themselves.
The competitive landscape for destination marketing in Austria is genuinely demanding. Neighbouring Switzerland and Italy consistently rank among Europe's most visited leisure destinations and deploy substantial destination-marketing budgets targeting the same Northern and Central European source markets that Austria prioritises. The Austrian National Tourist Board competes in global destination marketing rather than a conventional product category, as noted by Clapboard, and must generate emotional differentiation rather than functional distinction. The AUTfluencer mechanism delivered precisely that: a campaign architecture that was inherently newsworthy and structurally resistant to imitation, because its logic depended on the influencers' willingness to actually disappear.
The timing aligned with broader travel market momentum. International tourism reached 1.4 billion arrivals in 2024, up 11% versus 2023 and approximately equal to 2019 volumes, according to UN Tourism. International tourism receipts totalled US$1.6 trillion in 2024, up 3% in real terms versus the prior year, also per UN Tourism. Within this recovering market, the destination-marketing sector is estimated to be growing at a compound annual rate of approximately 12.7%, according to Future Market Insights. For Austria, launching a culturally distinctive campaign at the start of the 2024 summer season meant entering a market where traveller intent was high and competitive noise was equally elevated. The #iamAUT initiative used the influencers' own follower bases as a distribution channel, bypassing paid media dependency and anchoring reach in pre-existing audience trust.
Christian Hellinger served as Chief Creative Officer on #iamAUT at Wien Nord Serviceplan, with creative direction shared between Georg Rernböck and Axel Spendlingwimmer, and concept and copywriting handled by Pia Rosenstingl and Michael Maier, as documented by House of Communication and confirmed by Clapboard. Art direction and graphic design were the responsibility of Sarah Kitzmüller, Marie-Gracielle Oniemba, and Igor Klymenko, with account direction led by Stephanie Lechner and account management by Madlen Berger.
The creative execution demanded restraint at every level. The AUTfluencers — ordinary Austrians, not trained content professionals — were placed in front of large, existing audiences without the scaffolding of a production crew or a content brief demanding aesthetic consistency. This was a deliberate choice. The slight roughness of locally produced content, the absence of a creator's signature visual style, and the unfiltered focus on Austrian food, landscape, and daily rhythm gave each account a texture that polished sponsored content cannot manufacture. Lieselotte's takeover of xLaeta's Salzburg-based feed, for instance, centred Austrian culinary culture in a way that felt observational rather than promotional, according to reporting by Little Black Book Online.
The campaign name itself carried creative weight. #iamAUT fused national identity with the first-person declaration of an influencer's personal brand — a compact double meaning that worked simultaneously as a tourism hashtag and as a statement of cultural pride. The AUTfluencer terminology extended this logic, turning an ordinary Austrian into a category, a credential, and a character type within the same coinage. Film production for the initiative was handled by Kaiserschnitt, as documented by House of Communication, providing the broader campaign assets that contextualised the individual account takeovers within Austria's visual identity as a destination.
The campaign's open application process — inviting influencers from across Europe to apply for their own offline Austrian vacation — extended the creative concept beyond its initial four participants and transformed it from a finite stunt into an ongoing, scalable initiative with its own momentum.
The #iamAUT campaign generated 25 million views across campaign content, as reported by Contagious and confirmed by Ots At. The open application process attracted more than 100 influencer applications representing over 2.3 million combined followers from 15 countries, figures reported by Contagious as of July 18, 2024. These numbers indicate that the campaign's secondary mechanic — inviting further influencers to apply — functioned as a demand signal in its own right, demonstrating that the AUTfluencer concept had sufficient cultural currency to prompt voluntary participation at scale.
No verified data on bookings, revenue lift, brand-tracking movement, or return on advertising spend for #iamAUT is publicly available. The metrics that have been published are reach and participation-based rather than conversion-based, which reflects the campaign's brand-building orientation rather than a performance-marketing objective. For destination marketing of this kind, view counts and application volume serve as indicators of earned media efficiency — the campaign generated audience engagement through its inherent newsworthiness rather than paid amplification alone.
The campaign received positive trade-press coverage from Contagious, which described #iamAUT as giving influencers a holiday from posting and characterised its stance against excessive phone use on holiday as culturally timely. The initiative also appeared on the Golden Drum 2025 shortlist in the Influencer Marketing category, as noted by Clapboard, though it did not win. No wins were recorded across Cannes Lions, Effie Awards, The One Show, D&AD, Clio Awards, or WARC Awards at the time of publication.
Clapboard rates #iamAUT at 78 out of 100, reflecting a campaign concept that is structurally inventive and culturally well-timed, with a scalable mechanic and strong earned-media logic, offset by the absence of published conversion data and the inherent difficulty of attributing destination choice to any single campaign touchpoint.
#iamAUT is a 2024 campaign by the Austrian National Tourist Board, created by Wien Nord Serviceplan, in which European influencers took genuine social-media-free vacations across Austria while ordinary Austrians — called AUTfluencers — temporarily took over their accounts to share authentic local culture with their existing audiences.
AUTfluencers are everyday Austrians selected by the Austrian National Tourist Board to manage the social media accounts of participating European influencers during the #iamAUT campaign. One example is Lieselotte, who took over xLaeta's account in Salzburg and focused her content on Austrian food culture, as reported by Contagious.
Four European influencers anchored the campaign: xLaeta from Germany in Salzburg, Giulia Lamarca from Italy in Schladming, Polina Burashnikova from the Netherlands in Seefeld in Tyrol, and Jitka Novackova from the Czech Republic at Lake Traunsee, with a combined audience of approximately 4.1 million followers, as reported by Contagious.
#iamAUT generated 25 million views across campaign content, as reported by Contagious and OTS.at. The open application phase attracted more than 100 influencer applications representing over 2.3 million combined followers from 15 countries. No verified bookings, revenue, or conversion data for the campaign has been made publicly available.
Wien Nord Serviceplan created #iamAUT for the Austrian National Tourist Board in 2024. The campaign's chief creative officer was Christian Hellinger, with creative direction from Georg Rernböck and Axel Spendlingwimmer, and concept and copywriting by Pia Rosenstingl and Michael Maier, as documented by House of Communication.
#iamAUT appeared on the Golden Drum 2025 shortlist in the Influencer Marketing category, as noted by Clapboard, but did not win. No wins have been recorded at Cannes Lions, Effie Awards, The One Show, D&AD, Clio Awards, or WARC Awards. Clapboard rates the campaign 78 out of 100.
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