Astronaut for a Day Austria 2025

With the "Astronaut for a Day" initiative, the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG) together with the Federal Ministry for Innovation, Mobility and Infrastructure (BMIMI) aims to provide young people between 15 and 17 years of age with special access to aviation and space travel, as well as the opportunity to experience a zero-gravity flight themselves.

The goal was to achieve at least 200 applications for the program and inspire as many young people as possible about the topic. The challenge: The target audience was partially not directly reachable, as many platforms restrict targeting under 18 years of age. At the same time, the campaign also targeted parents, teachers and older siblings to achieve additional reach and generate further applications through a targeted word-of-mouth effect.

The campaign ran from 3 to 29 June and combined reach measures with focus on video views with a targeted traffic campaign to increase clicks to the registration page.

All video content was delivered as dark ads, meaning exclusively through paid campaigns and not published organically. The strategy relied on clear target audience engagement: Students as the primary target audience as well as parents, teachers and older siblings as multipliers.

Four platforms were used for campaign delivery that have proven particularly effective with the target audience: TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram and YouTube. While TikTok and Snapchat were primarily used for direct engagement with young people, Instagram and YouTube also served as channels for activating multipliers through high-reach formats.

Through custom and lookalike audiences, targeting was continuously refined and further supplemented by retargeting measures in the final campaign phase. There, the best-performing assets were deployed again, reinforced by a scarcity message ("Register by 29 June only"), to specifically increase traffic.

The creatives were individually tailored to the target audiences and channels, primarily in high-performance 9:16 formats. The existing material from previous years was limited, which is why the focus was on developing new, targeted assets with strong call-to-action. The campaign was continuously monitored, with ongoing performance monitoring and active community management through direct responses to comments and inquiries.

With 246 qualified applications generated from young people, the campaign goal of 200 was exceeded by 23%.

Overall results at a glance:

• Total impressions: >11.7 million
• Total complete video views: > 442,000

Impressions per platform:

• TikTok: 6 million impressions
• Instagram: 2.2 million impressions
• Snapchat: 2.9 million impressions
• YouTube: 454,077 impressions

TikTok proved to be the clear best performer with the highest reach and very favorable view costs and was therefore ideal for engaging the young target audience. YouTube was a good complement for activating multipliers.

Budget allocation was efficiently distributed: With differentiated channel setup and targeted creative development, broad visibility and high interaction were achieved.

An additional effect: On Instagram, over 400 new followers were gained in June. Although this was not a defined goal of the campaign, it is a pleasing result for long-term community building.