Nordlys
Client: SAS, Visit Norway, Northern Norway
Deliverables: Social Strategy, Paid Media, Art Direction, Copywriting, Influencer Strategy, Reporting & Analytics
Nordlys came from a feeling more than a format. Northern Norway already had the raw ingredients, the aurora, the frozen fjords, the peaks, the silence, but what it needed was a world around it. Something richer than a standard destination campaign. The brief was to position Northern Norway as the ultimate Northern Lights destination, and SAS as the airline that gets you there. The route we took was to create a place that felt almost mythic in its own right, using “Nordlys”, the Norwegian word for Northern Lights, as the motif for the region as a whole.
I played a central role in shaping how that world came to life on social. As social lead, I wasn’t just dropping creative into channels after the fact. Audience insight, influencer strategy, visual direction and platform thinking all fed into the campaign from the outset.
We brought in a handpicked group of nature photographers and travel influencers who could do more than just post pretty pictures.
They had the right style, the right sensibility and the right audiences to make the place feel magnetic. From there, I ran the influencer and paid social side so the storytelling could build intrigue across the UK, US and Germany and give Nordlys a real social presence of its own.
That presence took off fast. The Visit Nordlys Instagram account gained over 10,000 followers in just over three weeks and reached more than six million unique users. Northern Norway then hit its highest search volume in five years, overtook Iceland in search interest for the first time in two years, lifted conversation share from 30.2% to 40.6%, and SAS saw a 14% passenger increase to its Northern Norway destinations. The campaign also won Gold for Best Social Media Campaign at the Travel Marketing Awards