Sveriges Radio, Swedish national radio, has an ongoing public service mission to keep the citizens informed. In 2014 that mission became even more important, with the Swedish elections coming up.

But a lot of young Swedes don’t even listen to the radio anymore. And it’s a real challenge to make them more passionate about politics. So how do you get their attention and make them care about the elections and Swedish politics in general? By de-dramatizing dead serious politics in an unexpected context - in a media where the younger target audience both feel at home, and spend time.

In short: We teamed up with Tankesmedjan, a popular satire show on Swedish Radio, and launched Debattle: A DJ-style app that lets anyone chop up political speeches into political rap battles between politicians - which can then be shared in social media.

In only one week Debattle become the second most popular music app in Sweden on both App Store and Google Play, right behind Spotify. In average every app interaction lasted over 6 minutes. The app also created a lot of user generated content in the form of rap-battle videos shared in social medias. News media, prominent twitter profiles and bloggers wrote about Debattle. Even the hip hop community started talking about the app, which resulted in reaching many more in the target audience than the documented 15.000+ app downloads. But most importantly, Debattle got young voters to engage with Swedish politics and Sveriges Radio – while having a bit of fun at the same time.