Who was the target audience?
Everyone, really. People in Sweden and people across the globe. Swedish people who downloaded the app come from all backgrounds and they all have their own opinions about the country. I think that’s the great thing about this campaign. Every time you call you get the personal view of someone different about the country. We didn’t give them any instructions. They could speak about whatever they wanted to. So every time people called they got different kind of information about Sweden. For example, I signed up and spoke with people about restaurant recommendations in Stockholm, family holiday ideas, music venues, meatball recipes and Game of Thrones.
We didn’t want to narrow down the appeal of the campaign. We could have directed it to people in Germany who might be thinking about coming to Sweden for fishing but in the end we just wanted to keep it completely open and let everybody speak about whatever they wanted to. I think that’s one of the reasons why it became so successful. So far we have received calls from 186 countries.
Tell me about the process – what did it take to do this?
There were hundreds of things that could have gone terribly wrong. The key factors in this campaign were to get enough Swedish people to download the app so they could answer the phone if people started calling. And then, we had to get the world to call us. With no media budget.
We knew it wouldn’t be easy but we felt so strongly about the idea that we decided that one way or another we would make it work. If we’d had 10,000 calls then we would still be reasonably happy. But it took off in a way that we never expected.
How did you get Swedes to download the app and participate?
We had plans to use celebrities to promote the campaign but we didn’t end up doing that. We only used the Prime Minister who called and told us he wanted to participate. We estimated that we could spread the word about it with around 200 people and, worst case scenario, these people would be everyone from the agency and their friends and families. But when the press picked it up, it went huge. We announced it at Sweden’s biggest TV show and from then it just took off. Now we have more than 30,000 people from Sweden who have downloaded the app. We actually had problems in the beginning because we couldn’t let people in as quickly as they were signing up. We were number one in the App Store for a few weeks in Sweden too.
We know the campaign has been extremely successful. Why do you think this is the case?
One of the reasons is because we kind of made the digital interaction analogue again. You know, people can talk badly about places, things and others on social media and they can hide behind screens. But we facilitated a personal, real interaction between people and that makes it difficult to be rude. You call because you’re curious. And you pick up the phone because you’re interested too.
The second one is that because this idea is very media-friendly. It’s very easy to be picked up and made mainstream globally. Very often campaigns can do well in certain markets but this one has gone totally global and resonated with everyone.
