How do you get young adults in Latvia and Lithuania to care about tick-borne encephalitis? Especially when most of them are more likely to check in at a forest hike on Instagram than check the stats on tick-bite risks?

That was the challenge GlaxoSmithKline handed to us. No media budget. A tough audience. A serious message.

But also, a key insight: our audience was constantly tagging their location on Instagram—especially in nature hotspots. And many of those hotspots overlapped with regions where tick-borne encephalitis is endemic.

So we flipped the script: what if ticks could follow you?

We created an Instagram-based activation using actual geo data from tick-bite reports across Latvia and Lithuania. Each endemic region got its own tick-bot: a dedicated Instagram profile with real local data—tick bite counts, encephalitis stats, and the nearest vaccination points.

Here’s where it gets interesting: as soon as a user tagged themselves in one of these high-risk areas, they’d get a follow from the local “tick.” The name and profile picture made them pause. Curiosity took over. They’d click through, land on the tick’s page, and get hit with the message: “This region has had [X] tick bites. Encephalitis is real. Here’s where to get vaccinated.”

We didn’t spend a cent on media. No ads. Just smart use of geo-tagging, public data, and Instagram’s native behavior.

The result? Over 200,000 users followed. More than 20,000 clicked through to the vaccine info site. All organic. All from a creepy-crawly campaign that made people stop scrolling and start thinking.

Because sometimes, the best way to get a message across... is to let a tick do the talking.