International Tourism is worth SEK144bn in Sweden and employs 177,000 people, but due to COVID and lockdowns, in 2021 it was down 80%.

To save the industry, Visit Sweden needed to do something it had never done before… advertise Sweden to Swedes!

For the first time, Visit Sweden was given the mandate to market Sweden's tourist offerings to the Swedish domestic audience. The challenge was to inspire Swedes to discover new experiences and destinations to support the tourism and hospitality sector during the pandemic.

While marketing Sweden to Swedes sounds easy enough, we needed them to not just sit in their (summer) houses but inspire them to truly re-discover their country and experience its beauty at a time where they were asked to not get too close to people. To achieve that, we needed to go beyond beautiful scenery imagery and discount offers and codes.

Our ‘Involuntary Tourists’ shared their experiences and connected authentically with our broad target audience, who had also had their lives interrupted by the pandemic.

Our media and channel strategy was to build high visibility and high reach in the market, and to communicate an emotional message across all the age segments, using video and play platforms, social media, native and audio spots.

Reach-building channels were combined with channels and formats with high credibility, interest and engagement from our ‘Everyday Life Enjoyers’ and ‘Active Nature Lovers’ audiences, such as podcast collaborations and 'true native' articles in news and lifestyle media. This connected our audience to our emotional stories and the real personalities and experiences across Sweden behind them.

Finally, we used Visit Sweden’s digital platforms to create 'experience recommendations', partnering with travel expert Expedia and Nordic media powerhouse Schibsted's interactive summer map ‘Swedish Smultron Ställen’ (Swedish Hidden Gems) to gain authority.

A 30” film introduced ’The Involuntary Tourists’, followed by shorter individual films of specific tourists' experiences. We drove visibility through an integrated online video campaign across commercial streaming platforms, YouTube and the largest web-TV platforms ensuring maximum unique reach.

Integrated podcasts and true native articles from our Involuntary Tourists took our audience closer to their experiences, allowing them to explore their journeys, destinations and recommendations and inspiring them to follow in their footsteps.

Social Media was used for cost effective reach and for traffic driving, delivering consumers to the campaign hub where they could explore the different tourist’s

We collaborated with Schibsted Aftonbladet (Sweden’s largest tabloid newspaper) and integrated the Involuntary Tourist’s experiences into their ‘Summer-Pearls’ interactive map. We highlighted and recommended key destinations and experiences and our audience could search for attractions within 2-hours travel of their location as well as interact and give their own Swedish travel tips.

With international tourism decimated, we successfully inspired Swedes to fill the gap.

· 61% want to explore new destinations they did not know before.

All executions over-delivered against previous Visit Sweden, benchmarks:

Video:

· 3.8M+ unique contacts

· 83% completion for YouTube pre-rolls, 91% for web video

· Web-video CTR 160% better than benchmark (0.13% vs 0.05%)

Social:

· Unique reach over 2.3M, >75% of target group, 16% better than benchmark.

· Generated 43,528 landing page views, with CTR of 3.38%, 225% better than benchmark (1.04%), CPC of SEK 1.96 (benchmark 6.38).

Podcasts and true native:

· 878,646 sound impressions | 52% over-delivery.

· True Native articles delivered 81,822 readings | 54% over-delivery.

· Native articles averaged 01:30 reading time | 300% above Schibsted’s 00.29 benchmark.

For the first time ever Visit Sweden has been asked proactively to include domestic tourism in its remit by the Swedish government.