Title	THE EPIC VOLLEY
Brand	SCANDIC HOTELS
Product/Service	SCANDIC HOTELS' SPORTS FOCUS
Category	A08. Sports Entertainment
Entrant	JCP Oslo, NORWAY
Idea Creation	JCP Oslo, NORWAY
Production	SPAETT FILM Trondheim, NORWAY

Name	Company	Position
Eirik Moldal Andersen	JCP Ignite	Creative
Marius Hanstad	JCP Ignite	Creative
Paul Little	JCP Ignite	Creative Director
Kim Reksten Grønneberg	JCP Ignite	Account Director

The Campaign

We decided to create the world's highest volley shot off the roof of Scandic Lerkendal, Norway's third tallest building, situated in Trondheim city, perfectly situated next to Rosenborg's pitch. A few select players were to kick balls down onto the pitch were the rest of the team would attempt to volley it in. The roof was 88 meters above, and 40 meters across from the pitch, which made it actually uncertain whether the team would pull it off.

Creative Execution

The players nervously entered the roof of the hotel and from there they could peek over the ledge of the no-fenced area, down to their home pitch of Lerkendal. The conditions were rough. After six players had done 44 attempts in strong winds and freezing conditions, Pål Andre Helland passed a perfect ball to Mike Jensen who managed a truly epic volley! After airing on TV2, Norway biggest commercial TV-channel, the film was launched organically on Scandic's Facebook page (160k followers) and shared by Rosenborg FC (220k followers). Keeping in mind that Norway is a nation of just 5,2 million inhabitants, this gave a good start to the spread in social media. The campaign was also taken out in traditional media, such as airport ads through Clear Channel’s network, paid advertising on Facebook, and various print ads.

TV2, NBC, Fox Sports, The Sun, Goal.com and media in over 30 countries, on all continents, covered it. The film is for instance the 3rd most watched film on The Sun's football page. The German Bundesliga club, FC Ingolstadt, even copied our idea and made a tribute to our original film called Rosenborg 2.0. Through 124 national and international news articles, the stunt has reached out to an audience of 272,4 million people in traditional media, with a PR value of 1,1 M Euros. In addition to this, hundreds of millions of Facebook and Twitter users were exposed. When it comes to sales, Scandic is enjoying a 42 % increase in sport-related bookings, thanks to their efforts towards the sports segment! In addition to that, Scandic has landed a new deal with The Norwegian Ski Federation.

What happens when we truly create meaningful and captivating communication? Well, it spreads to the entire world! The film The Epic Volley, where Rosenborg players hit a volley 87 meters, was shared in more than 125 medias worldwide. ESPN, The Sun, The Guardian, NBC, The Mirror, Fox Sports, Vice Sports, Daily Record, and sports medias in France, Scotland, Spain, Portugal, Brazil, Germany, Canada, Turkey, Australia, China and Nigeria, showed it, wrote about it and some even made their own versions of the film that put Scandic on the map as hotels built for sports.

We wanted to take advantage of the fact that Scandic has built a hotel next to Rosenborg's stadium. By using the Scandic Lerkendal's excellent location to this activity we could strengthen the bond to the sponsor object and the associations to Scandic as a sports hotel. We wanted to focus on the camaraderie within sports teams - a big part of traveling with your team is building the bond and creating team spirit. For this Norwegian audience we wanted to show Rosenborg in a more down-to-earth way. At the same time we wanted to put their nationwide celebrity factor to good use, and create a spectacular world record attempt.