This year, DNB wanted to contribute with two extra concerts, one in Northern Norway, where Tromsø was chosen, the other to be decided by holding a competition between 75 cities in Norway. The criteria for winning were engagement and creativity.
The competition was advertised via VG-lista and DNB’s Facebook page and website and on the VG Rampelys website. The reason for focusing on engagement and creativity was to stimulate engagement. Many competitions are pure voting contests, which was something we wanted to avoid. The resounding success on social media is one matter; but think about what happened in real life in the cities ‒ because the response was overwhelming.
To give some examples: 1,100 people turned up in Otta to dance, and Finnsnes got the entiire town on its feet to do a Harlem shake; mayors and bank managers took a dip in the sea (which is very cold in May), and songs were written and performed; and everyone from government ministers, Davy Wathne, and Little Steven joined in. Sortland, which won the competition, demonstrated an impressive level of engagement, with music videos, town parades and most hashtags. One video in particular impressed the jury
We received as many as 137 videos, which have now been uploaded to YouTube with hastag #vglista. 47,000 images have been tagged on Instagram, and the images we posted have received over 28,000 likes in addition to thousands of comments and shares.
As many as 58,000 viewers watched VGTV’s live broadcast when the winning town was announced at 13.00. This represents a lot of traffic ‒ ten times more than normal at that time of the day.
DNB did a good job on engaging its customers and branches through its own channels of communications.
Camilla Forberg, Head of Branding and Sponsoring in DNB, said: “We decided to do what Norwegians do every summer ‒ get out and about! It’s difficult running advertising campaigns on TV when no-one is sitting at home and watching, so we decided to follow our customers outdoors.”
We would like to round off by thanking our customers and cooperation partner DNB, and Øyvind Solstad, VG’s Head of Social Media, who masterminded the staging of the competition.
Øyvind says: “VG-lista has always been a popular event in social media because the young people are used to using Facebook and Instagram and because the artists have wide appeal. We were hoping for a good response, but that it should be so good exceeded all our expectations. People have done a fantastic job at organizing and at demonstrating incredible imagination. I think the jury ‒ which was supposed to take engagement and creativity into account ‒ had a tough job deciding.”
The results:
- 47 000 tagged pictures on Instagram
- 28 000 likes on city picures on Facebook – the pictures where then shared 7 900 times
- 137 uploads on YouTube
- 99 press coverages with hit on both DNB and vG-lista (Retriever)
- 58 000 watched the live TV when «by x» was announced