VAB Driving School: Influencer & Content Marketing Awards 2026

Case Name: VAB Driving School | Submitter: The Fat Lady | Category: B2E Content Marketing

Can you introduce The Fat Lady?

The Fat Lady is a Belgian content marketing agency. We help organizations become relevant to the people they want to reach: customers, employees, stakeholders, or future employees.

In doing so, we prefer not to start from the question “What do we want to say?”, but from “Why would someone want to pay attention to this?” That is a fundamental difference. It leads to communication that feels less like communication and more like something people can really benefit from.

We combine strategy, creation, content, distribution, and digital expertise in one team. Depending on the challenge, this can result in a content platform, video, social content, magazines, podcasts, or campaigns.

The Fat Lady is part of North by Northwest, together with MediaMixer and FAMA Relations, among others. This allows us to organize strategy, creation, production, and distribution more easily in synergy.

In 2025, we were named Content Marketing Agency of the Year at the Best of Content Awards.

What is the name of the case?

'There isn't just one reason to become a driving instructor. There are 101.' How VAB Rijschool put a profession with a structural shortage of candidates back on the radar by giving 101 real reasons to choose the trade instead of coming up with a single employer promise.

Who was the client?

VAB Driving School, part of VAB, one of the best-known mobility organizations in Belgium. Today, the driving school has more than 350 certified driving instructors and around 70 branches in Flanders.

The briefing and the objectives

Belgium has too few driving instructors. In Flanders, it is a so-called bottleneck profession: a profession for which employers structurally struggle to find enough candidates. At present, there are only about 1,600 active driving instructors throughout Belgium. This immediately makes it clear how limited the pool is.

For VAB Driving School, that problem became increasingly urgent. Some of the experienced instructors are approaching retirement age, while younger generations hardly consider the profession as a career option.

That was the real problem for us. You can write the best job vacancy in the world, but if someone has never thought, “driving instructor, that might be something for me,” you are too late.

Moreover, the step into the profession is quite significant. Candidates must first complete a training program and take exams before they can start working independently. Therefore, you are asking for much more commitment than with a typical vacancy.

And the perception of the profession didn't help either. From the outside, it quickly looks like driving around in circles all day and explaining the same maneuvers over and over. The instructors themselves told us something completely different: about freedom, social contact, working independently, flexible hours, and the satisfaction of seeing someone build self-confidence step by step.

The assignment therefore became bigger than recruitment. We first had to make the profession worth considering again. Only then could we ask people to start working in it.

Insights and strategy

A classic recruitment campaign often looks for *the* reason why someone should choose an employer. But when we spoke with driving instructors, we discovered the exact opposite: there wasn't just one reason.

One loved the freedom. Another was looking for a second career. Someone else particularly enjoyed the contact with young people or the moment when a student finally dared to hit the road independently.

Why, then, would we try to convince all those potential candidates with exactly the same employer message?

That is why we didn't start at VAB, but with the people we wanted to reach. Next, we asked the instructors themselves why they had chosen the profession. Their answers formed the basis for '101 Reasons to Become a Driving Instructor'.

Those 101 reasons made it possible to appeal to very different people in a relevant way. On TikTok and Instagram, this was done with short, playful formats and content from the instructors themselves. Those who wanted to know more found longer stories and practical answers regarding training, working hours, and career opportunities.

This way, VAB didn't have to come up with one perfect employer promise. We helped people discover their own reason. That audience-first principle is also exactly how we view content marketing.

The case

The campaign actually started with listening.
We spoke with the people who sit next to novice drivers every day and asked them one simple question: why do you enjoy this job?

The answers turned out to be much richer than anything we could have come up with ourselves at a meeting table: freedom, helping people, no two days the same, flexibility, a career switch, the satisfaction when someone finally succeeds after weeks of practice.

With that, we had enough material to showcase the profession from a different angle time and again.
The 101 reasons could be retold constantly, each time from a different perspective and in a different format. Sometimes very short and funny in the social feed, sometimes more personal in a testimonial, and sometimes practical when someone was already seriously considering the program.

In this context, the instructors were not extras in an employer branding campaign; they were the story. Their experiences made it possible to showcase a profession that appears rather uniform from the outside as very multifaceted from the inside.

All content led to a single place where candidates could further explore what the job entails and easily take the next step, for example by registering for an information session, downloading a brochure, or getting a taste of the profession.

And people are taking that step too. The first wave of the campaign led hundreds of interested people from curiosity to registering for information sessions and downloading the information brochure. That figure takes on extra significance when you consider that Flanders currently has only about 1,600 active driving instructors.

In this way, 101 Reasons became more than a recruitment campaign. Before having them apply for a profession they had never considered, we gave people reasons they could identify with.

Read all about the Influencer & Content Marketing Awards 2026 and how to submit cases HERE

www.contentmarketingawards.nl

Follow Marketing Report on LinkedIn