The Kings Bay drama

The mining accident in Kings Bay on Svalbard in 1962 took 21 Norwegian lives and created a political earthquake that brought down the Gerhardsen government. This was to become a movie.

The big challenge with the film and the campaign is that the drama takes place over fifty years ago and is unknown to most people and definitely to the younger cinema audience. Thus, the challenge was to primarily mobilize the adults/older people who have the most references to the accident. The main goal was to create awareness of the film and curiosity about the accident, the aftermath and the causes. This was to get as many people as possible to visit the cinema.

Dagbladet put on exclusive material
Dagbladets content department worked directly with the client, SF Norway, and PHD. The content department wanted to recreate the drama so that those who experienced the disaster in the 1960s were reminded of the event. They also wanted to create curiosity among younger people. Dagbladet had a wealth of exclusive material in the form of images and reports. This had to be used.

Formats were used that were suitable for telling complex stories. A three-episode documentary was made about the accident, the political aftermath and the theories: What if the real cause of the tragedy is different than we think? Here, the film launched new and nerve-wracking theories that played on today's major political lines in a very exciting way. The documentary was published in the campaign week before the premiere.

- This is a real-life drama. And it's a story that changed Norway, perhaps much more than we think, because it had such major political consequences. That's why the opportunities inherent in the campaign were so exciting and appealing," says Asbjørn Halvorsen, Head of Content at Aller.

A two-page content print ad was also created in Magasinet with a short version of the documentary.

The full-screen format and netboard on mobile were designed to create awareness of the film.

Twice the reading time of a normal content story
The campaign attracted a lot of attention with full screen and netboard in Dagbladet. In addition, the content solutions in Magasinet and the special in Dagbladet. Online, the stories had an average reading time of up to 3:19 minutes. This is almost twice the reading time of a normal good content story. The stories had a total reading time of 103 days.

- "The campaign was a record breaker. I simply haven't seen such a high reading time for commercial stories before," says Asbjørn Halvorsen. He gives journalist Pål Mathiesen much of the credit for the outstanding results.

- "Pål was behind the research and wrote this story. He has worked for Dagbladet and Magasinet for many years and is a storyteller of the rare kind," says Halvorsen.

SF Film was impressed with the
campaign - "The content campaign we ran for Kings Bay in Dagbladet gave us good results, with high reading time, engagement and interest in the articles. We were also very pleased with the quality of the content that Dagbladet delivered," says Marketing Manager Janne Holmboe.

The three-chapter special, published over six half-days in the week leading up to the premiere, was highly successful and the thrilling and dramatic message received a huge amount of traffic and attention on Dagbladet. This resulted in just over 54,000 clicks in this short period.

- "This has been an incredibly fun case to be involved in, we hit the mark with the right message in the right context, both online and in print. This was the first time we created an episode-based content case in a special format that we have only used for editorial longreads before," says Strategic Sales Manager Carl-Fredrik Ullerø.

Contact Head of Content, Asbjørn Halvorsen, or Sales Manager Carl-Fredrik Ullerø for more information about the case.

Kings Bay is nominated for Aller Best from the first quarter of 2017