In 2014 Spies Travel launched the ‘Do it for Denmark’-campaign in order to promote city-trips and address the historical low birth rates in Denmark at the same time. It was a highly controversial campaign combining sex & humor completely true to the heritage of Spies’ controversial, yet beloved founder, Simon Spies, famous for creating headlines.
The campaign turned out quite successful. However, the birth rate was still too low despite a little progress after last year’s effort. We decided to re-activate the massive buzz and PR created by the first campaign by making a sequel, but with a new twist that would once again make the Danes share and engage with our content. Our take was those who suffer the most from the low birthrates are those mothers that will never experience having grandchildren. That was why we joined forces with wannabe grandmas of Denmark, who have become grandma-broody. We had one common goal: More babies. We launched this campaign with the battle cry ‘Do it for mom’.
To get the baby-making started we prescribed active holidays. Studies have proved that couples that sweat together have more sex. This combined with the fact that you have 51% more sex on a sunny holiday leads to more sex and therefore more babies aka. Grandchildren. In order to give potential grandmothers a strong tool, we developed the Spies Parent Purchase™ product, where they could prepay active holidays for their children and in-laws in order to make the magic happen. To show that we were in this together, we threw in some discounts as well. Segmented social media content followed the online film. This created relevant engagement within different target groups, whose online behavior had shown that were interested both in our online film and in specific sports relevant to Spies’ assortment.
The campaign quickly went viral and reached more than 1 million views within the first 24 hours. Three weeks into the campaign (when this was written), the online film had a total of +8.500.000 views across Youtube, Facebook and internal players. +1 million are Danish views equivalent to 1 out of 5 Danes. The campaign has generated +600 news clippings internationally in media such CNN, Washington Post, Fox News, Bild, the Guardian, Playboy and Time Magazine. More than +100 Danish media brought the campaign, which had a total reach of +600 million people. The total earned media so far is estimated at 11.3 million Euro. 1.6 million Euro was generated through Danish media alone creating a 5812% ROI on the Danish PR budget. Hollywood celebs such as Ashton Kutcher and Sulu from StarTrek among others posted the film to their Facebook timeline and the campaign has reached +140 million social timelines. More than 500.000 people has either commented, liked or shared the campaign so far, creating a social action rate of 6% (equivalent to ‘Epic split’. Note: 4% is considered highly viral). The early sales results are also positive with a +21% sales lift in the first two weeks.
Historical low birth rates are a huge problem for Denmark. This was unknown for most Danes two years ago, but Spies has changed that through engaging and entertaining branded content. First, they did it with the “Do it for Denmark” campaign and this year they continued their quest to create more babies with the ‘Do it for mom’ campaign. The central content of the campaign was an online film, which quickly went viral turning it into one of the most talked about campaigns in Denmark ever.