Sleepless At Playground

Background

Playground is a store in Stockholm that sells hiking gear and other products designed for the great outdoors.

They wanted to launch an online store and to generate traffic and sales.

Idea

The start-point for this campaign was a study written by the Swedish Health Council, claiming that hiking makes people healthier and more alert.

The question the team asked was this:

IF HIKING MAKES YOU MORE ALERT, EXACTLY HOW LONG CAN HIKING ATHLETES STAY AWAKE?

From that thought came the idea of a competition, ’Sleepless at Playground’.

Four hiking enthusiasts were employed and given two briefs. One, they had to sell products. Two, they had to stay awake.

All customers who bought products from the hiker who stayed awake longest got their money back.

Results

The really bad part of the campaign was that Playground had to reimburse 32% of their customers.

The really good part was that 75% of those customers who got their money back then used it to buy more stuff from Playground.

Site traffic increased eight times. 70% of people who engaged were first-time visitors to the site. sales went up 137% compared to the same campaign period the previous year, conversion rate to online purschase was 10% and time spent on the site engaging with the brand increased seventeen-fold.

Our Thoughts

Playground has a history of consistently great direct work, starting with the ‘Hey Hardass’ campaign of five years ago, when they left notes on the saddles of every bike parked in central Stockholm on snowy days, offering the cyclists discounts on cold-weather gear. If Akestam Holst have anything to do with it, this is a retail operation that could become a really big business – because everything they do is fresh and engaging but never irrelevant or ridiculous. Whoever it is who commissions and buys this work from the agency is someone unafraid of making decisions.