The Swedish Number
The Swedish Number was a tourism campaign that used a phone number to call Swedes who volunteered to participate. It is by the Swedish Tourist Association, Intelcom, and the Swedish Institute. The campaign was started on April 6, 2016, and was ended on July 25.
History
The campaign was in development for 2 years. Near a month before the campaign released, Visit Sweden left development, but the Swedish Institute joined development after.On April 6, 2016, the Swedish Tourist Association, along with Intelcom, INGO Stockholm, and the Swedish Institute released the campaign. The campaign was released on the 250th anniversary of the removal of censorship in Sweden.
The campaign was supposed to be ended on June 6th if it didn't find a sponsor for the amount of money for maintaining the campaign's calls, but on July 25th, the campaign ended.
Overview
The campaign had a phone number, to call random Swedes who signed up to be called on a website. In order for a caller to have a call, the Swede on the other side must accept the call through an app, and requests for calls only go to people who enable calls to go to them. Before the caller gets a response, a synthetic voice would say "You are calling Sweden, you will soon be connected to a random Swede somewhere in Sweden." All of the calls were recorded to prevent harassment.The mission statement of the campaign was to create more interest to Sweden, to "connect people in troubled times," and to recruit more people to work in the tourism association.
The campaign reportedly had 197,678 calls. With most of the calls coming from the United States, Turkey, and the United Kingdom.