Situation:

Lack of international tourists hit Norway hard during the first summer of the pandemic. The summer months are particularly crucial for the travel industry in Northern Norway. So, this time around we desperately needed to compensate for the decline of international tourists with an increase of domestic travelers.

Brief:

Convince Norwegians to travel to Northern Norway for the summer vacation.

Objectives:

- Engage the rest of the country through social media

- Create desire to travel north, even though most Norwegians want to avoid the cold in summer.

- Increase overnight hotel bookings throughout the region.

Most Norwegians have never experienced the northernmost part of Norway. Because the distance is so great, we usually spend our vacations in warmer countries in southern Europe.

However, international tourists love travelling to Northern Norway, and they can’t stop praising it on social media. They have tried all the restaurants, seen all the sights, done every activity - and they love it! We realized that every comment they left could be used to motivate Norwegians to experience their own country.

So, we gathered the top 13.000 comments we could find on social media posted by enthusiastic visitors from all over the world. Then we got the funniest guy from Northern Norway to read them all aloud - in one take. Creating what must be the longest travel review ever made!

When the pandemic prevented international tourists from visiting us, we used their love to get Norwegians to travel north instead.

13.000 reasons, 404 pages and 7 hours of one-take film don’t exactly fit the conventional criteria for a social media campaign. But we figure some rules are meant to be broken!

Our first challenge was to get people to listen in the first place. Our local comedian and TV-personality, Truls Svendsen, became our brand ambassador and helped us with just that. In a live-streamed effort he attempted to read this Goliath of a travel review out loud. The record-breaking attempt gave us a tremendous amount of material that we used to engage the public through social media and inspire them to travel.

We felt confident in our strategy, but did we have exactly the right 13.000 reasons Norwegians needed to travel North in their own country? That remained to be seen.

«Top 13.000 reasons why you should visit Northern Norway» became the longest travel review of all time.

It took seven hours to record and was published in its entirety on YouTube - breaking all rules and records for the format. We published highlights and different portions of the review across social media platforms, as well as in ads and paid content. We even used specific comments to target people with different interests within our target group.

A PR-strategy was in place to secure editorial coverage both nationally and regionally. All 13.000 comments in their entirety were published on Visitnorway.com for an extreme long-read, together with inspirational articles based on the reasons provided by our international visitors.

We reached 72% of our target group with content created from this record-breaking travel review. And even though only the most enthusiastic watched the full seven hours, people on average watched it for a good nine minutes.

Most importantly, Northern Norway got 33% more Norwegian visitors compared to the first summer of the pandemic. It seems 13.000 compelling reasons was just enough to get Norwegians to travel in their own country.