(Part one of a three part series )
Reykjavík, Iceland - A geeky man, face smeared with white cream, talks to camera while splashing his hand in an Iceland hot spring.
“In our open world experience everything is real and has been for millions of years,” he says. “It's completely immersive with water that's wet … humans to connect with.”
He turns to the woman next to him in the hot springs: “You’re human, right?”
She nods.
Icelandverse was a parody of Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement changing the name of Facebook to Meta, in honour of the metaverse.
This is a fine example of a creative campaign on a limited budget which took off on the world stage. Driving it is quirky Icelandic humour, with a sense of the ridiculous and on-the-go ingenuity.
Iceland, a tiny country of 372,000 people, soars well above the global creative league when it comes to its series of tourism campaigns, Inspired by Iceland.
“The Icelandverse is unlike any other open-world experience with ‘-verse’ in name, because it’s real,” says the man in the video clip. “Plus, you don’t need a funny-looking VR headset.”
Zuckerberg apparently wasn’t offended by a reference to “super weird”. He and his wife later went to Iceland and did an Icelandverse photo dump on Instagram.
Inspired by Iceland also has clips of Icelandic horses creating out of office emails with their hoofs using purpose-built keyboards, spacemen competing with space tourists and connected speakers where people worldwide could log in and scream out their COVID lockdown frustrations.
The campaigns, by a local agency, Peel, and SS+K in New York, part of the M&C Saatchi Group, went off around the world, gaining mountains of earned media.
Magnús Magnússon of Peel has been involved with Inspired by Iceland since 2010. He and his partner then worked for another company. They reached out to M&C Saatchi to create a joint tender.
“All of the production is done here in Iceland,” he says. “We've been using different production houses here and there are maybe 10 production companies in Iceland that are at that level to do these ads.
“And of course, the client is here in Iceland. So it's quite common that we have meetings in English and then kind of afterwards we'll do the Icelandic review, making sure that we all understood because, of course, our first language is Icelandic.”
The commercials demonstrate an overlay of local humour. “It's definitely at least inspired by Icelandic humour,” says Magnússon.
“One of the things that both the client and us here, the Icelandic part of the team, is doing is making sure that it feels Icelandic. Our goal is to make sure that everything feels authentic and feels more concrete, something that an Icelandic creative mind would come up with.
“However, some of the things don't translate that well between markets. American humour and British humour are a little bit different. We're kind of in the middle.
“But I think Icelandic people are in a way more connected to an awkward style of humour, a bit quirky.
“My favourite part in the Icelandverse is when he tries to open the door and he doesn't really know where his hands are.
“And the more it drags on, the more fun it becomes for Icelandic people.”
Iceland gets a lot of American and British television but also a few from Australia, including The Block and Masterchef, both of which are popular.
“I think we are similar in a way that we grab different cultures,” says Magnússon.
“We’re sitting somewhere in the middle and enjoying, maybe, a little bit darker humour. We're not as proper as the Americans but we're also not as dark as the British.”
Some of the jokes in the campaigns were created on the spot. But Magnússon says the work usually gets better after two or three rounds with the whole group, making sure that the quirkiness comes across.
The client was also deeply involved day-to-day.
Sveinn Birkir Björnsson, director of marketing communication at Business Iceland, thinks the campaign is very reflective of Icelandic humour.
But to him the key element that makes it successful is that part of the Icelandic character not to be boastful. Don’t sing your own praises.
“From the very first iteration of the campaign, we always aimed not to be boastful,” he says. “Not saying that we are above something else. It's always a little self deprecating, in a way.
“And just making sure that poking fun at something was done without really putting it down or without putting ourselves above it.
“What we've always wanted to do was just make sure that we don't come off as boastful and arrogant. Maybe just the key to making it successful is just managing to draw that line and stay within it.”
Iceland’s problem was to differentiate itself from the other northern areas of the world, including Scandinavia and Canada, which also have glaciers, midnight sun, mountains, hot springs and northern lights.
These can outspend Iceland eight to one in media buy. Norway alone has ten times the population.
“We have to compete somewhere else,” Björnsson says. “We have to move the playing field, where it's more advantageous to us.
“Being a small country, we don't have the same layers of approval that you would have to go through. The group is a little more tight knit and the path to a decision is a lot shorter.
“So we can move a bit more freely. We can allow ourselves the trust to be a little off kilter, and do things a little differently.
“That's an advantage we're trying to use. Being able to do things a little differently allows us to compete in a way that brings up to a level without really having a bunch of spend.”
Stevie Archer, executive creative director at SS+K in New York, says the crazy collaboration started in March of 2020, just a few weeks after the pandemic kicked off.
Inspired by Iceland had its tourism account out to tender. Global travel had just come to a halt. A significant portion of Iceland's GDP comes from tourism and the country needed an agency partner to help navigate COVID.
“At the time, it was very charming,” she says. “Then the thought was we need to save the summer, because nobody knew how long this was going to last.
“We were among a double digit number of agencies that submitted. We brought together that team with our PR agency Talk and our Icelandic partner, Peel.”
The pitch came together in about two weeks and the client called back in a couple of weeks: “We want to work with you.”
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