Audioland: Weber Shandwick global CCO on scaring people into visiting Sweden
Visit Sweden’s audio-driven advertisement, ‘Kiln’, drew on Swedish mythology and folklore, and Weber Shandwick’s global chief creative officer Tom Beckman said the agency leant on this to attract tourists.
In his keynote session at last week’s Mumbrella Audioland, Beckman discussed the unique execution of the advertisement as part of Visit Sweden’s Spellbound by Sweden campaign.
Tom Beckman speaking at Mumbrella Audioland last week
When creating the spot, Weber Shandwick wanted to take a step back and look at the Visit Sweden brand with new eyes. Beckman said the agency wanted to have a ‘vuja du’ moment.
“The vuja de experience is when you walk into a situation a thousand times, but suddenly feel something new,” Beckman said. “That’s the moment I try to have with all the clients I work with.”
But Beckman acknowledged the issue Weber Shadwick faced was that tourism campaigns are visual, and Sweden’s landscapes lacked a bit of visual appeal by comparison to those of its nearest neighbours.
“Sweden is very remote, there’s not much to do, it doesn’t look very good…You need to find something else to add to the experience to get people to come,” he said.
“Norway is beautiful, the whole tourism industry of Norway is orientated around this. Same thing with Iceland, it’s got epic sceneries. So that’s something that is difficult for Sweden to compete with. Sweden has pine forest.”
Weber Shandwick created a unique frame story for the Visit Sweden brand – ‘Welcome to Something Else’ – drawing on Swedish mythology, witchery and crime literature.
“There’s a rich witch history in Sweden, there’s this idea that nature is alive and has a soul. People go to the forest…because in the old days, the forest was alive,” Beckman said.
“But we needed to add a layer of culture to the nature. We cannot compete with just our pine forests.”
The agency collaborated with Swedish horror author John Ajvide Lindqvist, getting him to write a horror story based off one of the spirits in Swedish culture – the siren of the woods.
“She [the siren] will lure people in and it doesn’t end well,” Beckman said. “And then she ‘owns’ them. So John wrote that story utilising Swedish folklore.”
The full audio campaign was only available in Sweden, using geolocking on Spotify.
Beckman said: “It’s like you show someone a trailer to a movie, but have to go to the cinema to see the film. The same thing here, we showed the trailer, but you have to come to Sweden to experience the full story.”
Beckman said Weber Shandwick wanted to “do something else” in the campaign to get tourists to Sweden.
“We say ‘Welcome to Something Else’ because we wanted to do something other tourist organisations might not do,” he concluded.
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Lauren McNamara is a journalist at Mumbrella, covering the creative and PR beat. She joined in November 2022 as editorial assistant, after completing a Bachelor of Communications (Journalism) at UTS.
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