VELUX wanted to create awareness about the importance of daylight and fresh air. The main objective of the campaign was to start a global conversation around bad indoor environment and to encourage people – and also other stakeholders like architects, politicians and health organizations to involve and engage in the subject and consider daylight and fresh air (roof top windows) as an important part of home improvement projects.

We chose to build the campaign on the fact, that we spend 90% of our lives indoors. In other words, we have gone from being part of nature to being apart from nature. This is a surprising fact – but to us also a stunning insight into the way we live our lives today, and it is a great gateway to explaining how lack of daylight and fresh air makes us ill.

It was vital for us to coin a creative concept, that would make the indoor environment feel relevant. It is a highly complex issue, and in order to create awareness and activate people, we had to make ourselves relevant, not only to the professional segment, but to all of us.

We wanted people to be able to recognize themselves as part of The Indoor Generation and really feel, both mentally and physically, the importance of this agenda.

We wanted to go beyond classic product PR, and speak with people, not as customers, but as humans. Thus, the PR strategy was planned in the context of the following conversational themes:

Indoor air can be up to five times more polluted than outdoor

Living in damp and moldy homes increases the risk of asthma by 40%

Lack of daylight makes 15% of us sad

Daylight can boost your children’s learning abilities by up to 15%

Kids’ bedrooms are often the most polluted room in the house

Tapping into an existing global context concerned with health and wellbeing, was a key driver of success. All traffic was directed to the main hub of the campaign – www.theindoorgeneration.com with extensive knowledge, insights and tips & tricks on how to improve indoor environment. The global awareness campaign was supported by a local campaign on digital and TV titled “Solutions for The IndoorGeneration”.

Media partnerships with globally influential titles such as The New York Times, Huffington Post, Viral Thread and I Fucking Love Science became one cornerstone to combine credibility and reach from the beginning.

Having journalists’ preference for data and surveys in mind, we also carried out a population survey across 14 markets with 16,000 respondents and turned that in the backbone of the news push, which was flavoured with existing research from Harvard and Oxford. The creative development, distribution and PR strategy was been integrated from day one of the campaign, which allowed us to create a campaign, that travelled between people.

+100 million views of film

+47% of them were unpaid views

+1 share of the film per second the first week

+1.5 million shares in total

Best UK performing paid partnership video in 2018

+50% VTR (View Through Rate) on native video

+2.82 billion OTS (Opportunity to See) from global PR coverage

+2,450 published PR articles worldwide (estimated advertising value of 5.1 mio. €)

+725,000 visits to global campaign site www.theindoorgeneration.com

1.47 average articles read per user

+100,000 qualified marketing leads

Between 9-13% lift across markets in people that are aware that a good indoor environment protects their health

+10% lift in people who would put daylight and fresh air on their top three list if they were to renovate their home

VELUX experienced a huge lift in unaided brand awareness in the four key markets:

UK: +26%

Germany: +30%

France: +206%

Netherlands: +29%