LiveRiga's Policeman Guide to Riga campaign, created by DDB Latvia in 2018, stars WBA cruiserweight champion Mairis Briedis patrolling and presenting his city.
ARCHIVELiveRiga Puts a Champion Cop at the Heart of Riga Tourism
The Policeman Guide to Riga is a 2018 film campaign created by DDB Latvia for LiveRiga, the official tourism promotion body for Latvia's capital, starring Mairis Briedis — WBA cruiserweight boxing champion and working Riga police officer — as an insider guide to the streets he patrols every day.
LiveRiga published the campaign in October 2018 in Latvia, positioning Riga not as a postcard destination but as a living city with texture and character. The campaign's creative premise rests on Briedis's singular dual identity: a man who defends the city in the ring and on the street, whose connection to Riga is professional, physical, and deeply personal. That duality gives the film an instant narrative tension — the tagline posed it plainly: good cop or bad cop? See for yourself.
The campaign belongs to a broader creative platform that DDB Latvia built for LiveRiga across 2017 to 2019, as documented on liveriga.com. That platform consistently placed local personalities — a taxi driver, a runner, a policeman — at the centre of visitor discovery, treating authentic local experience as the destination's primary product. The Policeman Guide to Riga represents the platform's most high-profile execution, pairing international sports recognition with ground-level civic credibility. In Latvia, where the tourism economy was recording consecutive years of growth through 2018, the campaign arrived at precisely the moment the market could absorb a bolder, personality-driven creative statement. The Clapboard Score for this campaign is 73 out of 100, reflecting strong concept and cultural relevance with moderate measurable reach.
ARCHIVELiveRiga's strategic positioning centres on authentic experience over conventional sightseeing. The insight driving the Policeman Guide to Riga is straightforward: travellers in the late 2010s increasingly sought genuine human encounters with a destination rather than curated highlights reels, and that shift demanded a different kind of tourism spokesperson.
In Latvia, the tourism sector was demonstrably growing at the time of the campaign's release. According to the OECD and data reported by Eng Lsm Lv, Latvia recorded 2,808,808 accommodation visitors in 2018, an increase of 9.0 percent year-over-year, while foreign visitors totalled 1,925,397 arrivals in 2018, up 8.2 percent, according to En Wikipedia. Within that national picture, Riga dominated: data from Stat Gov Lv indicates that Riga captured approximately 77 percent of all foreign visitor stays in Latvia, making the capital the essential battleground for tourism marketing investment. The leading source markets for foreign visitors to Riga in 2018 were Russia, Germany, Lithuania, Estonia, and Finland, according to eng.lsm.lv, defining the audience LiveRiga needed to reach and persuade.
Against that backdrop, conventional destination advertising — scenic aerials, heritage landmarks, restaurant montages — faced intensifying creative competition from city-brand campaigns across the Baltic and Nordic regions. Competitors for short-break visitor attention in this segment include Tallinn's Visit Estonia platform and Vilnius's tourism authority, both of which invested in distinctive creative positioning throughout the same period. DDB Latvia's response for LiveRiga was to sidestep the visual commodity trap entirely by anchoring the campaign in a figure whose fame was already international — Mairis Briedis — while keeping the storytelling resolutely local. The campaign's series format, documented on liveriga.com, also allowed LiveRiga to build cumulative creative equity across multiple executions rather than relying on a single film to carry the entire brand message.
DDB Latvia executed the Policeman Guide to Riga as a single film asset, deploying a documentary-inflected aesthetic that suits its subject. Mairis Briedis guides the viewer through Riga's streets with the ease of someone who has walked them on shift, and the camera treats those streets with the same unposed attention it gives to Briedis himself.
The creative team behind the campaign includes copywriter Vairis Strazds and art director Didzis Paeglis, with creative direction credited to Jānis Nords, as documented in the campaign's award submissions. Account management was handled by Ance Jēkabsone and Laura Ziemele, while Pēteris Līdaka is credited in the production chain, per the awards entry records cited by Adwards-Showcase Submit To and Awards Ddb. The directorial and production craft choices reinforce the campaign's strategic position: the film does not announce itself as advertising. It moves at the pace of a patrol, unhurried and observational, allowing Riga to emerge through Briedis's commentary rather than through scenic intercuts.
The choice to shoot on location across working Riga rather than in prepared or dressed environments is consistent with the platform's broader commitment to unmediated local reality, as reflected across the full DDB Latvia series documented on liveriga.com. The film sits within a short-film tradition that the broader Insider's Guide to Riga series helped establish for the brand. That series — which also includes the August 2018 Tennis Guide to Riga, as recorded on clapboard.com — earned a silver medal at the New York Festivals TV and Film Awards, as reported in the 2019 New York Festivals results. The Policeman Guide to Riga specifically was listed as a finalist in the online video category of Latvia's Adwards showcase, as documented by adwards-showcase.submit.to.
The Policeman Guide to Riga generated 74,296 views, 592 likes, and 35 comments on the platform where it was archived, as recorded by clapboard.com. These are archive-page metrics rather than independently verified campaign delivery figures, and no broader paid-media performance data for the campaign is publicly available. Nevertheless, the engagement ratio — meaningful interaction relative to view count — is consistent with a film that attracted an audience self-selecting for genuine interest rather than passive impressions.
The campaign's most verifiable external recognition comes through the award circuit. The Policeman Guide to Riga was listed as a finalist in the online video category at Latvia's Adwards showcase, as documented by adwards-showcase.submit.to. The broader Insider's Guide to Riga short-film series, of which this campaign is a part, received a silver medal at the New York Festivals TV and Film Awards, as reported in the 2019 New York Festivals results. That recognition at an international festival confirms that the creative platform achieved a level of craft and strategic coherence recognised beyond the Latvian market.
Structurally, the campaign demonstrates strong concept-to-execution alignment. The dual-identity premise is not a surface device — it generates every beat of the film and gives the narrative a reason to exist beyond promotion. The use of a genuinely famous local figure who holds an unglamorous public service role creates an asymmetry that sustains curiosity. For Latvia's tourism ecosystem, where Riga accounted for approximately 77 percent of foreign visitor stays according to stat.gov.lv, a campaign that meaningfully differentiates the city's character from regional competitors carries disproportionate strategic value. The Clapboard Score of 73 out of 100 reflects that strategic and creative strength, moderated by the limited independently verified distribution data available.
The Policeman Guide to Riga is a 2018 film campaign created by DDB Latvia for LiveRiga. It stars Mairis Briedis, a WBA cruiserweight boxing champion who also serves as a working Riga police officer, guiding viewers through the city he patrols daily. The campaign was published in Latvia in October 2018, as documented on clapboard.com.
Mairis Briedis is a Latvian professional boxer and former WBA cruiserweight champion who works as a police officer in Riga. LiveRiga and DDB Latvia selected him because his dual identity as a city guardian and international sports figure gave the campaign both local credibility and global recognition, embodying authentic insider experience rather than celebrity endorsement alone.
The campaign's credited team includes creative director Jānis Nords, copywriter Vairis Strazds, and art director Didzis Paeglis. Account management was handled by Ance Jēkabsone and Laura Ziemele, with Pēteris Līdaka also credited in the production, per award submission records documented at adwards-showcase.submit.to and awards.ddb.com.
The Policeman Guide to Riga was listed as a finalist in the online video category at Latvia's Adwards showcase, per adwards-showcase.submit.to. The broader Insider's Guide to Riga short-film series, which includes this campaign, received a silver medal at the New York Festivals TV and Film Awards, as reported in the 2019 New York Festivals results.
The campaign belongs to a DDB Latvia creative platform spanning 2017 to 2019 that placed local personalities at the centre of visitor discovery, as documented on liveriga.com. Other executions include a taxi driver guide from 2017 and a runners' guide from 2019. The platform consistently treats authentic local experience as Riga's primary tourism product.
Latvia recorded 2,808,808 accommodation visitors in 2018, up 9.0 percent year-over-year, according to OECD data. Riga accounted for approximately 77 percent of all foreign visitor stays in Latvia, per stat.gov.lv. The campaign launched into a growing market where differentiated city-brand storytelling carried significant competitive value against Baltic rivals including Tallinn and Vilnius.
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