Title	THE LAND OF ABSURDITY
Brand	AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL
Product/Service	THELANDOFABSURDITY.COM - A WEBSITE WHERE YOU CAN SUBMIT RIDICULOUS ZONES TO THE POLISH GOVERNMENT.
Category	D03. Use of Social & Digital Platforms
Entrant	ANORAK Oslo, NORWAY
Idea Creation	ANORAK Oslo, NORWAY
Media Placement	ANORAK Oslo, NORWAY
PR	ANORAK Oslo, NORWAY
Production	NORTH KINGDOM Stockholm, SWEDEN

Name	Company	Position
Hallvard Fjeldbraaten	Anorak	Copwriter
Jens-Petter Aarhus	Anorak	Art Director
Marte Langfjæran	Anorak	Designer
Yngve Nilssen	Anorak	Designer
Thea Helgeland	Anorak	Social media manager
Camilla von Borcke	Anorak	Project Manager
Nokkvi Thorsteinsson	Anorak	Motion Designer
Darri Thorsteinsson	Anorak	Motion Designer
Erlend Dal Sakshaug	Anorak	Motion Designer
Emma Thorén	Anorak	Agency Producer
Janne Espevalen	Anorak	Client Director
Kaja Gilje Sekse	Anorak	Planner
Simen Eidsvåg	Sesong 1	PR Director
Siri Hveem	Sesong1	PR Manager

Why is this work relevant for Brand Experience & Activation?

The land of absurdity was not only a low budget campaign and an internet satire, driven by peoples engagement in social media. It was a different take on an Amnesty signature campaign, to put pressure on a government.

Background

Background: Poland has established so called LGBT ideology - free zones; Zones where you're not allowed to express your identity if you're not heterosexual. Media had been talking about it for a while, but it felt like the fear, that the LGBT-free zones was creating, just grew more powerful for every time they were mentioned. Brief: Amnesty International Norway has a long tradition supporting the LGBT-community. Their slogan is Love is a human right. With a small budget Amnesty International asked us to come up with an idea that showed their support and love for the members of the LGBT-community. So, if our biggest challenge was fear, we decided to make it possible to laugh at them. Objective: With a small budget we knew we had to really ourself on organic reach and earned media.

Describe the creative idea (20% of vote)

Idea: The land of absurdity - a website where anyone could create new and ridiculous zones, publish it on social media, and submit them to the polish government. Yes, just as absurd as their own LGBT-free zones. Why? Because love is human right.

Describe the strategy (20% of vote)

With almost no media budget we knew we had to bet on people. So to grab some attention we sent a tweet from Amnesty to the polish president, presenting our idea. And even though he didn't gave it a lot of love, others did. After just a few hours, the idea had spread to 37 countries and our hashtag trended on twitter. Now polish LGBT-activist turned our weapon into theirs. We were even featured on 4chan(unfortunately), where they organised a hacking marathon after one of the biggest polish daily newspaper wrote about us. And they didn't just repeat what the media had been talking about for a year, that the world found the LGBT-free zones scary and horrific. This time we had changed something in the story. This time the story was all about how stupid and silly they looked, how the world was laughing.

Describe the execution (30% of vote)

Implementation: We created a website where people could create their own ridiculous zones and spread it in social media. We promoted the site with a tweet from Amnesty to the polish president, telling him(and everyone that saw the tweet) about the site. Timeline: The campaign went live on may 27. 2021 and lasted to 27 of june (pride parade in Norway). Placement: - Thelandofabsurdity.com - A tweet from Amnesty International Norway to the polish president. - A Facebook post. Scale: The campaign was highly reliant on organic reach. It was a small budget campaign that was driven by peoples engagement, as they shared their zones in social media, as well as earned media.

List the results (30% of vote)

Our site got a lot of attention. Our hashtag was trending on Twitter. People from all over the world contributed and created their zone. Thousands of zones were created, liked and shared. (We don't have the tools to measure the exact numbers of reach, because of closed profiles on Facebook, but we know that the numbers of engagement was way beyond benchmark.) But maybe even more importantly, we got our message across: The LGBT-free zones are just absurd, because love is a human right.