While building a strong brand is a marathon, great ideas can be a sprint. A wonderful, exciting sprint. You’ll find my best ones below.
Mind: Ord Inuti/Words Within
According to research, talking about our feelings, and sharing them with others makes us feel better. It can even counteract depression and anxiety. Unfortunately, the Swedish language is not a very emotional one. As it was born at a time where it was more important to actually survive than mentally thrive it lacks words for common feelings.
So we decided to invent them. 150 new words, describing common feelings we all know too well. The words were gathered in the book Ord Inuti (Words Within) and sold as a part of Mind’s Christmas campaign. The first edition sold out in days and resulted in a fundraising all-time high. But most importantly, it started an important conversation about feelings.
Mind: Emotional Billboards
During the summer of 2017, non profit Mind launched a moderated online forum where anyone could share their feelings and offer support through life’s ups and downs.
In order to spread the word, we created a series of interactive billboards with feelings like anxiety, hopelessness and shame written in bright, led-lights. Each one connected to a thread in the forum.
When someone wrote a post, the billboard reacted in real time, flickering and simmering the lights. Just as the emotion would fade if you’d share it with someone else.
AD Women: Creating a more equal industry
Short after entering the advertising industry, my friend and past colleague Johanna and I realized it had an equality problem. Time after time we were told “there were no female creatives” when it was time to hire new talent. Eventually we decided to create our own solution to the “problem”.
Gathering all female creatives within Sweden we could find, we listed them on our page and made them searchable by title and experience. The url itself served as a proper answer to anyone complaining about not finding any female talent.
As the initiative got a lot of buzz and traction, we decided to create a global one. Encouraging the industry to fund it through a kickstarter ad-women.com was born in 2019. Full transparency, the site is in need of some TLC today but the initiative is still one of the things I’m most proud of in my career.
SJ: Dreamhack
Swedish Railways wanted to encourage gamers to take the train to Jönköping, Dreamhack. In order to convince them, we created a micro campaign written in gaming lingo.
The banners carrying our message was programmed with a special code, identifying the graphic card of the end user. If it was one worthy of a true gamer, the campaign banner apperad. The rest of us saw a plain, “go there and there at a great price”-campaign.
Exergi: Long live the shitty winter
Stockholm Exergi is responsible for the district heating system in Stockholm. A system they continually improve and upgrade for the sake of sustainability. As a result, their effort to counteract climate change would preserve our harsh, dark, shitty winters.
We made a film to pay tribute to the weather we hate the most, since it’s a sign everything is as it should be.