More than 1.5 million Flemish people watched the big final live show of Mijn Restaurant 2009 yesterday evening.

Claudio and Gaëlle, who became real pop stars during the program, won this year’s finals and were very impressed by all the people’s support that brought them to this victory. Sadly for Ann and Tom from Sint-Truiden, they need to let go their dream of owning their restaurant. During the last few days a big SMS campaign was set up in both camps in order to win over the most SMS messages. A huge marketing engine was developed during the episodes in which both finalists hired an entire promotion team but also contacted big sponsors. For instance, Kortrijk had GTV Harelbeke, a mobile phone store, as one of their sponsors. This sponsor offered 10.000 SMS messages in favor of Dell’anno, including a mailing to their entire customer base (600.000 mails) encouraging people to vote for Dell’anno. I wonder if Dell’anno still would have won if they only could count on the votes of the Flemish consumers excluding companies who sponsored?

And TV host Rani De Coninck said in the beginning of the live show that there was only a very small difference in the amount of votes for both restaurants, yeah right… Great tactic though in order to obtain a new wave of SMS messages and thus more profits

Amazing what press coverage this year’s program obtained in the media. The total amount of free publicity is estimated at 300.000 euro!

Reality TV is still hot, there is no doubt…