Bringing Italy to Sweden

The Swedish region of Halland naturally wants to attract tourists. Which region doesn’t? But the competition for travelers is tough with regions like Gotland, Dalarna and Skåne stealing a lot of the thunder. One thing that separates Halland from other popular tourist destinations in Sweden, however, is that they are renowned to have some of the best pizza restaurants in the country. And our client Visit Halland wanted us to help make more Swedes aware of this fact. But to be honest, every small town in Sweden has a decent pizza place, so we couldn’t just say they’re excellent – we had to come up with something better to get people’s attention. So, here’s what we did:

In the post covid-Spring of 2022 there was a chaotic situation around passports. People who had booked vacations abroad didn’t get new passports in time and had to stay at home. This was a huge media story and many people were disappointed. Many desperate Swedes without passports resorted to buying passport slots online for significant amounts of money, so Google searches for passport slots soared.

So, when we got the assignment to help Visit Halland talk about their world class pizzerias we got this idea: what if we found a way to connect these two separate things: passport chaos on the one hand, amazing Italian experiences in Halland on the other? We suggested rebranding Halland “Little Italy”, and our fantastic client said “Andiamo!” So we created a Mediterranean looking campaign site highlighting the best pizza, gelato and spiaggios in Halland. An Italian guide to Halland! And the best thing of all: you don’t need a passport to travel to Little Italy.

We then bought Google keywords for phrases like “book time for passport” – leading to our ad for the Visit Halland Little Italy campaign site.

The campaign performed very well although the budget for spreading widely was limited. During the campaign 25 percent of the people Googling “book time for passport” in the chosen geographic region (around Stockholm) saw our ads presenting Halland as “Little Italy”. And many also choose to visit the campaign site (CTR varied between 10-15% during the campaign period).

In our follow up PR campaign we made sure the clever move by Visit Halland got noticed in national, regional and niche media. Stories were published in Swedish national radio P4 Halland, Vagabond and RES (travel magazines), Resumé (media industry), Hallandsposten and others. And on social media the posts about this campaign got great organic spread.

Do more people today know that Halland is the place to go for that true Italian vibe – in Sweden? Allora, si!