The Bridge Builders

The city of Gothenburg in Sweden wanted to show that its new Hisingen bridge is more than just a way of crossing the river. Their vision was a bridge that, in several senses, connected people on both sides. It was to become a new landmark that would reshape Gothenburg’s skyline. The complex construction process has had a significant impact on Gothenburg citizens – with closed roads and slower traffic.

Our mission was to create awareness and understanding of the process among the city’s residents, but also to make employees and suppliers proud to be a part of the project. The objective was to create entertaining, and educational, content and reach as many people as possible.

To create engaging, ongoing content, we chose a web tv series format to document the construction project and the people behind it. The construction process in itself is interesting, above all because Gothenburg is home to numerous engineers. But to engage the general public, we added a human element to the series, following people working with the bridge.

The Bridge Builders focuses on the enthusiasts building the bridge. In twelve episodes viewers can follow the construction process chronologically and address one big event up until the opening ceremony in September 2021. After that, another episode was made in the same manner, but focused on the tearing down of the old Göta Älv bridge.

By following some of the main characters involved, we created recognition among the viewers, and allowed them to see many of the different disciplines needed to build the bridge. Each episode is about three to four minutes long and published on the bridge’s website hisingsbron.se and Gothenburg City’s social media channels. Shorter versions of the episodes were optimized for Facebook and Instagram.

The films were sponsored on YouTube and Facebook to target people within a one-hour car journey from Gothenburg. On average, 40 percent of the targeted users who got the film in their feed started to watch it. In total, the films have received over 3 million views and almost 300,000 three-minute views.

It takes relevant content to convince the audience to stop scrolling and watch a three-minute film. In total 18,000 hours - or two years! - of The Bridge Builders has been consumed. Compared to the tough competition on Gothenburg City’s Facebook site, episodes of The Bridge Builders were the most – and third most – engaging content during 2020. It has also led to almost 28 000 visits to the landing page of hisingsbron.se.