David Hasselhoff is an Endangered Species in New BBC Campaign

For the first time in history, BBC Worldwide (the commercial channel of the BBC) picked a Belgian advertising agency to develop a campaign for them. Duval Guillaume created a 360° campaign for BBC Brit around the launch of the very popular sitcom Hoff the Record, starring superstar David Hasselhoff.

David Hasselhoff (“The Hoff”) became world famous in the eighties with the American television series Knight Rider, in which he played a high-tech modern crime fighter assisted by KITT, an advanced artificially intelligent, and nearly indestructible car.  In the nineties, he became the most viewed star ever in the history of television, thanks to “Baywatch”, a series about the lifeguards on the beaches of Los Angeles. Baywatch could count on around 1 billion viewers per show.  From 2002 onwards, it went downhill with the superstar. He was accused of alcohol abuse and lost most of his fortune.

30 years after rising to fame with Knight Rider and Baywatch, the BBC decided to make a series on David Hasselhoff: “Hoff the Record”. The sitcom follows The Hoff as he moves to the UK to get his career back on track and make sense of his increasingly surreal life.

The team of Duval Guillaume was chosen to support the launch of the show in the Nordics. The creative idea was based on the fact that David Hasselhoff is a unique creature, who saved a lot of people in Baywatch. It’s now time that people save David. Duval Guillaume developed a 360° campaign around “Save the Hoff”: outdoor, 45 sec spot, 30 sec spot and bumper formats, 4 posters en three short movies. Production was done by Made in Brussels, photography and film direction by Kurt Stallaert. Shootings took place in London and Norway.

Activation took place in Oslo, where a charity run was organised “to save the Hoff”. Over 500 people collaborated. Biggest fan of the campaign is David Hasselhoff himself: he changed the header of his personal Facebook page to the campaign picture. The campaign is so successful that the BBC decided to use it also for the launch of the sitcom in the US.