Brief: Get Google Street View to the Faroe Islands.

Background

The Faroe Islands is one of the smallest countries in the world. The country have for many years been neglected by Google Street View. So until recently there was no Street View in the Faroe Islands. Google was simply not interested in the tiny country.

Thus, necessity begat invention. If even Google Street View wouldn't come to the Faroe Islands, we had to make the Faroe Islands visible to the rest of the world in a different way.

We decided to make street view our self with the one thing that the Faroe Islands have plenty of: Sheep!

We mounted 360-degree cameras on the backs of some sheep with solar pannels and a cell phone. The sheep wandered around and uploaded images via the phone through Google's open API. Sheep View was born.

Implementation:

We hired a young Faroese woman to personify the story. A girl and her sheep against the worlds largest corporation. David against Goliath.

We executed the idea with a strong focus on authenticity. Basically it was just a woman on a mission. Instead of high production value, we just used a webcam and no collar grading . Instead of a fancy website, we created a simple blog. We posted small films about the progress and challenges. We uploaded 360 film and photos from the sheep as the project moved forward.

Brand Relevance

The main attraction in the Faroe Islands is the nature and the camera on the back of the sheep gave us the opportunity to show the beautiful scenery in sheep perspective and 360 degrees on Street View and social media through 360 film.

Scale

In total we used twelve sheep. And broke five cameras.

Timeline

Faroe Islands' 'Sheep View' boosted tourism! Only 20 minutes after launch the story was on The Guardian, closely followed by BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera, Daily Mail, Washington Post, Sky News etc. With a total budget of just $280,000, the 'Sheep View' campaign generated 2 billion media impressions and an estimated PR value of $50 million.

The campaign caught the media's interest all over the in the world and suddenly Google was a little more amenable. They decided to support us with their equipment, and with the Google Street View team and at lot of volunteer help, we have now created Street View via Sheep View.

Results of Sheep View the campaign:

Reach: +2.000.000.000

News stories: +7.000

Website stories: 42.200

900 % increase for Google searches for "Faroe Islands"

21.3% of the exposed