Digital to physical / Alongside beautifully executed creative, this campaign achieves a real-world goal through digital means. It’s not often that we see a truly (apologies in advance for the nauseating portmanteau) phygital concept where there’s a genuine value exchange between the physical and digital worlds. As Nord DDB’s Jens Østrem so aptly puts it, ‘it is a case of the virtual world coming to the aid of the real world’. By offering Minecraft currency as a reward for recycling e-waste, Elkjøp Nordic taps into a huge and growing community of gamers, a large proportion of which falls into the campaign’s target audience: 15- to 21-year-olds comprise 43% of the player base, and under-15s account for around 21% of players.
Better together / The collaboration is a perfect example of a purposeful partnership – one of the key themes we picked out at Cannes Lions 2022. As Chrissie Hanson, this year’s Creative Strategy jury president and global chief strategy officer of OMD Worldwide, said during a press conference, ‘The “I hand you the baton, then you continue on the 400-metre relay race” is an old model of working. I'm actually asking you to run it together.’ With the common goal of recycling e-waste, Microsoft and Elkjøp Nordic bridge the divide the physical and digital worlds in which their audiences exist, and transform people’s old devices into a source of value.
Changing tack / As we recently observed in our coverage of Ikea’s Life Collection 2022 campaign, it’s all too easy to criticise when it comes to the climate crisis. People know generally what they should do, but doing it is another matter. So rather than admonish people for contributing to e-waste or hoarding old devices, Elkjøp Nordic highlights the problem and offers an attractive solution with a built-in incentive. As climate adviser and investor Corinne Sawers told Contagious earlier this year, ‘This idea that we both as individuals and as a society have to make big sacrifices or costs, is just bad economics and misunderstands the nature of the problem.’
Instead, she says, behaviour change requires strong incentives. ‘People only change their behaviour if the alternative is cheaper or better, or their friends are doing it. Companies only change their behaviour if they can make more money, or if [what they’re doing is] made illegal… Obviously, there are exceptions, but as a guide for how to achieve that incredibly fast and scaled behaviour change, we have to be realistic about how these different actors in the system work and what incentivises them.’
