CPNB. Boekenweek van de jongeren.

Reading books is sooooo 2021

Reading books has decreased in popularity among the younger generation over the past few years. Young people often feel like they’re forced to read. Either by their teachers or parents, telling them that it’s good for their development. An incentive that doesn’t really resonate with youngsters, reading is just not cool to them. Even when the magical door to reading for an up and coming reader has slightly opened youngsters are overwhelmed by the enormous amounts of available books, and have no clue where to start.

That’s why CPNB introduced the ‘Boekenweek van Jongeren’ (Book Week of Young People). Ten days that revolve around inspiring and encouraging young people (15-18 y/o) to start reading. 

And as it’s the ‘Boekenweek van Jongeren’, the youngsters are in charge. Our challenge? Come up with a campaign that enthuses young people to pick up a book, draws attention to the ten nominees 

of ‘Beste Boek voor Jongeren’ (Best Book for Young People) and create a relevant way to award the prize to the winners. 

Concept and execution

We went for an influencer approach since young people want to be inspired to read instead of being pushed and rather believe a peer than an organization to pick up reading. We picked two young influencers (@nuravanvliet and @meesvdam) who were not actual ‘Bookstagrammers’ or ‘Booktokkers’, but could still create a logical and authentic link with books and a young audience. Their challenge was to read one of the nominated books this week,

keep their community posted about their reading process, and inspire them to start reading themselves. In addition, we created content for the Instagram channel of ‘Boekenweek van Jongeren’. This content focused on taking away the feeling of choice stress in an interactive and innovative way as well as presenting the shortlist and winners of this year. Influencer Nura kicked off the ‘Boekenweek van Jongeren’ with an international surprise

award ceremony through IGTV. We created an overlap between the influencer accounts and their own account by reposting everything, but also by developing a fun Instagram face filter that the influencers, nominees, and community could use in their journey to start reading.  Alongside the influencers regularly updating and enthusing their following about their reading experience, one of them hosted a scavenger hunt and a

meet & greet inside an actual book store for his following. Throughout this campaign we managed to inspire a target group that is usually hard to get hyped about reading a book, through a diverse and versatile campaign set-up that perfectly fit the goal of ‘Boekenweek van Jongeren’.