• by Amy Corr , Staff Writer @MediaPostOTL, September 24, 2007

Weight Watchers is receiving a brand makeover in Belgium that, if successful, will give residents the chance for a leaner look.

Duval Guillaume Antwerp devised a series of guerilla campaigns across the country that center on the dreaded yo-yo form of weight control, where one month you're down 10 pounds and a few months later you're up 20. Mediaedge handled the media buy.

Digital stickers marked KG, for kilogram, were placed next to the constantly changing floor numbers of an elevator. As an elevator moves up and down flights, the number appears to fluctuate in kilograms, not floors. Two hundred elevators in seven major Belgian cities were affixed with stickers.

"Fed up with the yo-yo in most diets?" posits an adjoining sticker that also contains the WW Belgium URL.

"Weight Watchers has a huge perception problem: it is sometimes perceived as AA for fat people," said Geoffrey Hantson, creative director at Duval Guillaume Antwerp.

"Today people's biggest concern is no longer about losing weight but much more about keeping your ideal weight. In other words, it is all about avoiding the yoyo-effect. We repositioned Weight Watchers from an ultimate solution to lose weight (negative perception) to a solution to get to your ideal weight and keep you there (positive perception)," said Hantson.

Outdoor creative features a woman's torso clad in a bathing suit with a tear-away coupon on one side of her upper body. The more coupons torn away, the smaller the woman's figure becomes.

Broken yo-yos and boomerangs that resembled an oddly shaped strip of bacon were distributed to shoppers deemed likely Weight Watchers candidates. I can't do much with a broken yo-yo, and as mouth-watering and creative as the boomerang is, I wouldn't want to be singled out -- by a stranger, no less! -- as someone who looks like they could stand to drop a few pounds...

"Would you prefer if the fat didn't come back?" began the sticker on the boomerang. "Weight Watchers. "Get it off and keep it off."

The three-week-old campaign has so far seen an 8% increase in WW memberships.

"We are not yo-yos, so why would we behave like one?" concludes Hantson.