How LiveRiga Used Jelena Ostapenko to Put Riga on the Tennis World Map
LiveRiga's Tennis Guide to Riga is a 2018 film campaign created by DDB Latvia in which Latvian tennis champion Jelena Ostapenko guides viewers through her home city of Riga, connecting her personal athletic journey to the character and spirit of the Latvian capital as a travel destination.
Published in Latvia in August 2018, the campaign comprises a single film asset and belongs to the hospitality and tourism category. Its central mechanism is straightforward and precise: Ostapenko, who had won the French Open in 2017 to become the first Latvian player to claim a Grand Slam singles title, does not simply endorse a destination. She narrates it. The city of Riga is presented not through conventional tourism imagery but through the lens of one woman's lived relationship with it — its streets, its rhythm, its ambitions — making the film function simultaneously as a destination guide and a character portrait.
LiveRiga is the official tourism promotion agency for the city of Riga, operating in Latvia with a mandate to attract international visitors and position the capital as a competitive European short-break destination. In the context of 2018, when European city tourism was described by Skift as one of the sector's major success stories, the campaign entered a competitive landscape where destination brands across the continent were investing heavily in emotionally driven storytelling. Tennis Guide to Riga responds to that environment not with spectacle but with specificity, grounding its appeal in a recognisable Latvian identity that travels well internationally. The Clapboard Score for this campaign is 70 out of 100.
LiveRiga built Tennis Guide to Riga on a single, durable insight: a city becomes more desirable when a person the world already admires calls it home. Ostapenko's 2017 French Open victory had given Latvia a rare moment of sustained global sports visibility, and the campaign's August 2018 release positioned LiveRiga to harvest that attention before it faded. The strategy connects Riga's brand not to generic tourism promises but to the qualities — determination, surprise, an underdog spirit — that made Ostapenko's story internationally compelling.
This approach situates Tennis Guide to Riga within a broader lineage of LiveRiga and DDB Latvia collaborations built around local guides with authentic city connections. According to Clapboard, a 2017 predecessor campaign titled Go on a Journey With a Taxi Driver from Riga used a local cab driver as the narrative vehicle, while a 2019 successor titled Runners' Guide to Riga would extend the format into athletic leisure. The Tennis Guide to Riga sits at the centre of this evolving series, representing its highest-profile iteration by virtue of Ostapenko's international recognition.
In Latvia and across the wider European tourism market, LiveRiga competes for visitor attention against established city brands with significantly greater marketing resources. Visit London, for instance, operates campaigns tied to a multi-billion-pound tourism economy, as documented by London and Partners. Paris Île-de-France similarly commands global recognition that smaller capitals must work creatively to counter. According to the United Nations World Tourism Organization, Europe recorded international arrival growth of 4.9 percent in 2018, confirming the market opportunity but also the intensity of competition. LiveRiga's decision to anchor Tennis Guide to Riga in a specific, verifiable human story — rather than aspirational abstraction — reflects a sound response to that asymmetry.
Tennis Guide to Riga is directed by Jānis Nords, with creative direction by Vairis Strazds at DDB Latvia, according to Clapboard's archive records. The film's creative premise is structured as a documentary-inflected social experiment: Ostapenko moves through Riga not as a celebrity ambassador performing a script but as a resident sharing genuine knowledge of her city. This framing is a deliberate creative choice that separates the film from conventional celebrity endorsement formats.
Nords brings a documentary sensibility to the execution. The camera treats Ostapenko as a subject rather than a spokesperson, capturing her relationship with Riga's physical environment — its architecture, public spaces, and atmosphere — with an observational quality that reads as authentic rather than staged. This registers as credibility, which is the currency destination marketing most needs when speaking to internationally mobile travellers who are experienced consumers of tourism content and resistant to obvious salesmanship.
The film's editorial structure functions as a genuine guide: it offers specific, located content about Riga rather than sweeping impressionistic montage. This specificity serves both the tourism mandate and the documentary ambition simultaneously. Strazds's creative direction ensures that Ostapenko's personal narrative — her connection to the city's streets, her sense of what makes Riga distinct — does the argumentative work that a more conventional campaign would assign to voiceover copy or title cards. The result is a piece of content that operates comfortably in contexts beyond paid media, including sports journalism, lifestyle editorial, and social sharing, extending the effective reach of a single-asset campaign without requiring additional production investment.
No verified performance data for Tennis Guide to Riga is publicly available, and no award records for this campaign have been identified across Cannes Lions, the Effies, D&AD, The One Show, the Clios, the Webby Awards, or WARC Awards. Structural analysis, however, offers meaningful grounds for assessing the campaign's likely effectiveness.
The single-asset film format is a discipline that concentrates creative and distribution investment rather than diluting it. For a tourism promotion body operating in Latvia — a market where destination marketing budgets are modest relative to Western European capitals — this concentration is a strategic advantage. A single, well-crafted film featuring Ostapenko carries natural earned-media potential in sports and travel publishing sectors that LiveRiga could not purchase directly.
The campaign's timing is also structurally sound. Released in August 2018, Tennis Guide to Riga arrived approximately fourteen months after Ostapenko's French Open win, a window in which her international profile remained high but the initial media cycle had passed. That positioning allowed the film to operate as considered destination storytelling rather than reactive opportunism, lending it a durability that news-driven celebrity content rarely achieves. The documentary-social experiment framing, combined with Jānis Nords's direction, produces content with a longer shelf life than a conventional promotional film — a measurable structural asset for a campaign with no confirmed sequel in the same format. Against the Clapboard benchmark of 70 out of 100, the campaign demonstrates competent strategic alignment and above-average creative distinctiveness for its category and market.
Tennis Guide to Riga is a 2018 film campaign by LiveRiga and DDB Latvia. It features Jelena Ostapenko guiding viewers through her home city of Riga, framing the Latvian capital as a destination through her personal athletic story. The campaign was published in August 2018 as a single film asset in the hospitality and tourism category.
LiveRiga chose Ostapenko because her 2017 French Open victory gave Latvia rare global sporting visibility. Ostapenko's international recognition allowed DDB Latvia to connect Riga's destination brand to qualities — ambition, surprise, an underdog spirit — that her story had already made credible to an international audience before the film began.
Jānis Nords directed Tennis Guide to Riga, with Vairis Strazds serving as creative director at DDB Latvia, according to Clapboard's archive records. Nords applied a documentary sensibility to the film, treating Ostapenko as an observed subject rather than a scripted spokesperson, which distinguishes the work from conventional celebrity tourism endorsements.
Tennis Guide to Riga is the centrepiece of a series of guide-format films made by LiveRiga and DDB Latvia. According to Clapboard, a 2017 taxi driver film preceded it and a 2019 runners' film followed it. The Ostapenko campaign represents the highest-profile iteration of this format due to its subject's international sporting recognition.
Tennis Guide to Riga received a Clapboard Score of 70 out of 100. This reflects competent strategic alignment and above-average creative distinctiveness for a tourism campaign produced in Latvia in 2018, anchored by a documentary format and a credible local celebrity with verified international recognition at the time of release.
LiveRiga competes against destination brands such as Visit London and Paris Île-de-France, which command far greater marketing resources. In the European market, which recorded 4.9 percent international arrival growth in 2018 according to the United Nations World Tourism Organization, LiveRiga's strategy of specific human storytelling offers a cost-efficient alternative to broad-reach destination advertising.
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