Title	MEET THE LOCALS
Brand	LAPLAND THE NORTH OF FINLAND
Product/Service	FINNISH LAPLAND AS TRAVEL DESTINATION
Category	A10. INTEGRATED CONTENT CAMPAIGN
Entrant Company	SEK & GREY Helsinki, FINLAND
Contributing Company	SEK & GREY Helsinki, FINLAND
Media Agency	MEDIATOIMISTO VOITTO Helsinki, FINLAND

Name	Company	Position
Suvi Lähde	Sek/Grey	Copywriter
Sami Kelahaara	Sek/Grey	Art Director
Laura Mertano	Sek/Grey	Key Account Director
Sami Lanu	SEK/GREY	Stategist
Anni Toivakainen	SEK/GREY	Producer
Hanna/Mari Talvensaari	Lapland Lapland The North Of Finland Project/Regional Council Of Lapland	Marketing Director
Pauliina Silven/Alamartimo	Lapland Lapland The North Of Finland Project/Regional Council Of Lapland	Marketing Coordinator
Aleksanteri Baidin	Mediatoimisto Voitto	Senior Digital Planner
Nita Pilkama	Mediatoimisto Voitto	Account Director
Karoliina Hartikainen	SEK Public	Pr Manager
Markus Karikivi	Byroo	Digital Production/Project Coordinator
Jaakko Slotte	Freelance	Dop Lighting Cameraman

The Campaign

In the travel industry and as a holiday destination, Finnish Lapland is a challenger brand with small marketing budgets and a tight, but demanding target group. This sets a strict framework to work in and demands we always follow our challenger attitude when creating strategies for content and channels. We need to be smarter than just buying eyeballs and taking part in the shouting competition in the expensive international travel industry. For this campaign this meant a clear shift from traditional storytelling in mass media to creating branded content that would engage our target group in different online environments. With inspiring executions we managed to drive meaningful consumer engagement that enabled our brand message to reach millions of people around the world.

Results

Lapland – The North of Finland is No ordinary travel destination for No ordinary people. Its magical natural phenomena and high-quality services have been luring people here for decades, but times have changed. Travellers living through a global recession are now changing old luxury for modern exclusivity. In winter 2013–2014 Finnish Lapland wanted to awaken awareness and interest especially in the UK and Netherlands among our target group, Modern Humanists, which is 15 per cent of the global tourist population. But what would be interesting enough to fulfil the promise of unique experiences? To stand out in heavy competition we created a content-driven campaign that shifted from traditional advertising storytelling to storybuilding together with the travellers. The campaign “Meet The Locals” was born. Our idea was simple: we offered people a chance to swap lives with a local from Lapland for a week and built content around this. With inspiring online content we managed to drive meaningful consumer engagement that enabled our brand message eventually to reach millions of people around the world and raise Finnish Lapland’s preference as a winter travel destination.

We knew that our target group, Modern Humanists, is critical for traditional advertising and actively uses digital channels – at the same time we knew that in our own social media channels, engagement rate is exceptionally high and our content is interesting to the press. This formed the basis for our distribution strategy that relied on first seeding the content in our own channels and to selected PR partners. This was then supported with video banners and carefully targeted outdoor and print.

We reached 84,223,261 people at a contact price of 0.01 cents. Our banner’s unique CTR was 3.10%, which is 2 times higher than average. Our Facebook group’s engagement rate reached over 83%. We were able to generate 18% more visits to our website than before. The number of people in our target group considering buying a trip to Finnish Lapland grew by 40%, while our competitors Norway and Sweden lost their market shares in the target countries. During the campaign Finnish Lapland became the leader in social media with 72% share-of-voice compared to Norway and Sweden whose marketing budgets were over double ours. The campaign’s PR value raised media visibility by 2,279,090 euros – it doubled our media budget! Despite the historically tough economic environment, the number of travellers to Finnish Lapland increased by over 8% by the end of the year.