Valencia Tourist Board's 2022 campaign by Serviceplan Spain distilled over 200,400 real visitor reviews into a single poetic rap performed by world champion
ARCHIVEValencia Tourist Board Turns 200,000 Reviews Into a Rap Poem
Valencia Tourist Board's 2022 integrated campaign, created by Serviceplan Spain, distilled more than 200,400 real online visitor reviews of the House-Of-Communication.clapboard.com/archive/valencia-tourist-board-he-who-has-lived-it-knows-it-travel-leisure">Valencian Community into a single poetic rap performed by improvisation world champion Arkano, under the platform concept "He who has lived it knows it" — a campaign spanning video, audio, digital, print, and outdoor across Spain.
The campaign, published in Spain in July 2022 as reported by LBBOnline, represents an evolution of the "Quien lo ha vivido lo sabe" platform that Serviceplan Spain first established around 2021. Rather than constructing a destination narrative from a creative brief alone, the Valencia Tourist Board chose to let the accumulated testimony of real travellers define the region's identity, according to Little Black Book. The Valencian Community — encompassing Valencia city, the Costa Blanca coastline, and inland cultural landscapes — is one of Spain's most visited destination clusters, competing directly with Catalonia Tourism Board and Andalusia Tourism Board for share of national and international leisure travel attention.
The campaign's operational architecture was both technologically disciplined and creatively ambitious. A social listening tool swept the internet for every available review of the Valencian region, producing a raw corpus of more than 200,400 entries. An algorithm then isolated the words and expressions appearing most frequently across that body of text — light, sun, paella, sea, Mediterranean, tradition — narrowing the field to approximately 3,000 representative fragments. Those fragments became the raw material handed to Arkano, whose role was not simply to perform but to shape them into a coherent, emotionally resonant poem. Once the poem was complete, the production team conceived a filming plan that mapped each line to a specific location, action, or landscape within the region, ensuring that the written and visual layers of the campaign reinforced each other, according to Controlpublicidad. Clapboard rates this campaign 67 out of 100.
ARCHIVEServiceplan Spain identified a core tension in destination marketing, according to Marcommnews. The insight driving the Valencia Tourist Board campaign is straightforward: no tourism board copywriter can match the credibility of someone who has actually been there. In a travel and leisure category where consumer trust is increasingly shaped by peer review platforms rather than broadcast advertising, the decision to source the campaign's language directly from verified visitor experiences was strategically precise rather than merely novel.
The broader market context made this approach timely. According to the World Travel and Tourism Council, the global travel and tourism sector was forecast to contribute a substantial share of world economic output in 2022, though it remained below 2019 pre-pandemic levels. International tourism was rebounding across Europe, with nearly 250 million arrivals recorded in the January-to-May 2022 period, as reported by the United Nations World Tourism Organization. In Spain, destination boards were competing aggressively for the attention of both domestic and recovering international leisure travellers. Within the Spanish and Mediterranean destination-marketing landscape, the Catalonia Tourism Board and the Andalusia Tourism Board maintained strong competitive visibility, according to available assessments. Valencia's campaign needed to cut through not by spending louder but by feeling more authentic.
The platform concept — "He who has lived it knows it" — positions lived experience as the ultimate validator of a destination's promise. This is a classically effective experiential marketing posture: it treats the audience not as targets to be persuaded but as a community of past and future participants. The use of social listening at scale, processing more than 200,400 reviews before applying algorithmic selection, gave the campaign's creative foundation a verifiable provenance that few rival destination boards could claim. As reported by Branding News in July 2022, the campaign was designed for both national and international rollout, extending its reach beyond the Spanish domestic leisure market.
Guillermo Rodríguez, known professionally as Arkano, is the creative heart of the campaign's execution. Arkano holds the world championship title in rap battle and a Guinness World Record for improvisation, as documented by LBBOnline and Branding.news in their July 2022 coverage of the campaign. His involvement was not decorative. Serviceplan Spain positioned him as both performer and creative collaborator, tasking him with transforming approximately 3,000 algorithmically selected review fragments into a single evocative poem that could carry the weight of the entire Valencia Tourist Board campaign. Arkano described the experience in terms that reflect the scale of that responsibility. As published in LBBOnline on July 11, 2022, he said: "There were a million voices channelling through me. It's been a very exciting process."
The creative credits documented for the campaign include Executive Creative Director Emilio Valverde, Art Director Carlos Alcacer, and Digital Director Javier Ruiz, all working within Serviceplan Spain. The agency's approach to production planning was unusually literary in its discipline. Rather than developing the visual treatment independently and setting words to images, the team reversed the process: the poem was completed first, and only then did the filming plan take shape. Each location, action, and scenic element in the video was chosen to correspond with a specific passage of Arkano's verse, creating an integrated campaign where language and landscape are genuinely in conversation rather than merely running in parallel.
The campaign extended beyond a single film. Serviceplan Spain produced alternative videos tailored to specific product categories within the Valencian tourism offer, as well as a digital campaign and print and outdoor graphics. This multi-format architecture meant that the central creative idea — visitor language transformed into poetry — could be deployed consistently across the full media mix, giving the campaign structural coherence that supported both the integrated campaign objective and the experiential marketing positioning of the Valencia Tourist Board.
No independently verified audience reach or conversion figures for the 2022 "He who has lived it knows it" campaign have been made publicly available in the sources reviewed for this analysis. What is documentable is the campaign's structural scope. According to reporting by Branding.news and LBBOnline in July 2022, the work was conceived for both national and international distribution, extending the Valencia Tourist Board's integrated campaign beyond Spain's domestic leisure market and positioning it for European and global travel audiences.
The campaign's production investment is a matter of public record. Per the 2022 Turisme Comunitat Valenciana marketing documentation, the total campaign budget was five million euros plus VAT, as reported by House of Communication. That level of investment, directed through Serviceplan Spain, supported a multi-format rollout encompassing the primary film featuring Arkano, category-specific alternative videos, a digital campaign, and print and outdoor executions — a media footprint consistent with a major national tourism authority seeking sustained competitive visibility across Spain and internationally.
Assessed on its structural merits, the campaign's core mechanism — transforming more than 200,400 real visitor reviews into a single performed poem — creates a durable earned-media rationale. The use of a culturally specific, record-holding Spanish artist in Arkano gives the work a news hook that generic destination advertising cannot replicate. The reverse-engineered production process, where the poem preceded the filming plan, produced a creative output with demonstrable internal coherence. These structural qualities align with the conditions under which travel and leisure campaigns generate sustained recall, which is reflected in the Clapboard editorial assessment of 67 out of 100 for this work.
"He who has lived it knows it" is a 2022 integrated campaign by Serviceplan Spain for the Valencia Tourist Board. It processed more than 200,400 real visitor reviews through social listening and algorithmic selection, then handed the resulting fragments to rap-battle world champion Arkano, who shaped them into a single evocative poem performed on film.
Arkano is Guillermo Rodríguez, the rap-battle world champion and Guinness World Record holder for improvisation, as documented by LBBOnline. Serviceplan Spain selected him as both performer and creative collaborator to transform approximately 3,000 algorithmically selected review fragments into a cohesive poem that would carry the emotional weight of the Valencia Tourist Board campaign.
Serviceplan Spain applied a social listening tool to collect more than 200,400 online reviews of the Valencian Community. An algorithm then identified the most frequently recurring words and expressions, narrowing the corpus to approximately 3,000 fragments. Those fragments were passed to Arkano, whose creative and poetic intelligence shaped them into the campaign's central verse.
The 2022 Turisme Comunitat Valenciana marketing budget for the campaign was five million euros plus VAT, as reported by House of Communication. This investment supported the primary Arkano film, category-specific alternative videos, digital executions, and print and outdoor graphics across Spain and for international distribution.
The campaign was a fully integrated production. It comprised the central film featuring Arkano performing the review-based poem, alternative videos tailored to specific tourism product categories within the Valencian Community, a digital campaign, and print and outdoor graphics — all developed by Serviceplan Spain and published in Spain from July 2022, as confirmed by LBBOnline.
The Valencia Tourist Board faced direct competition from the Catalonia Tourism Board and the Andalusia Tourism Board, both of which held strong visibility within the Spanish and Mediterranean destination-marketing landscape. The "He who has lived it knows it" campaign differentiated Valencia by grounding its narrative entirely in verified visitor language rather than agency-constructed messaging, a strategic posture that peer-review-oriented leisure travellers increasingly value.
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