Advertising a City with a UGC Residency

Imagine a mayor of an upcoming city of 250K people in southern Europe.

He has a €1,000,000 marketing budget.

Now imagine if instead of spending it on agencies, billboards or promo videos: he ran a UGC residency.

Let’s say you can get people to come live and sleep in the city for a month, in exchange for making daily vlogs and short videos.

If you can accommodate someone for €3,000 per month (very good in southern Europe), you can fund 300 months of creators. After removing €100K for a small 2-person team to manage it (one strategist, and one ops).

Each creator posts two TikTok and one IG Reel per day: 120 short videos total + one or two YouTube vlog per week (so about 4 vlogs/month).

That’s around 36,000 videos total created inside your city.

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If you take a median of 500 views per short video, with about 0.2% of them hitting 1M views, you’d end up with around 89,964,000 total views during the campaign.

Now add a conservative +12% long-term residue (conservative – YouTube likely more) from search engines and recommendations (YouTube and TikTok might keep ranking videos for months), and you get roughly 100,759,680 lifetime views.

Assume a 0.005% conversion rate from view to travel booking (seemed ok).

That gives you about 5,038 booked trips.

And if most people come with a partner or family, that’s around 11,800 actual visitors.

Let’s say the average trip is 3 days and 2 nights, and each visitor spends €120 per day — that’s €360 per trip, nothing fancy.

Altogether, those visitors would spend about €4.24 million directly in your city.

With local economic effects (hotels, restaurants, taxis, shops), that’s roughly €7.6 million total impact.

That’s a 7.6× return on the original €1 million budget.

Now imagine if you target creators from countries or cities with direct routes (planes, trains, buses).

You could get creators from those regions to come, post, and naturally attract visitors from their own countries.

If you focus on 3 to 5 of those regions, you could really target key areas where transit is straightforward and thus increase conversion rates across the board.

Most of the estimates are conservative there.

Is this beatable with ads and conservative estimates there?