Branded content is becoming more and more like everyday entertainment. It's part of the Nordic citizens' everyday life. In order to stay relevant and create engaging content, brands have to entertain on the audience's terms.

When producing branded entertainment, you deal with social restrictions (Scandinavians are picky when it comes to how they want to be amused) and for some goods and services there are legal regulations, however not in this case.

We wanted to create engagement around a product with great benefits, especially for Nordic citizens. But what's good for you and what entertains you is not always the same. Our challenge was to create engagement around a better way to wake up – promoting and re-launching the Philips Wake-up Light.

We gave the audience the opportunity to become part of the content creation. The campaign was designed as an experiment, starting with the search for a human guinea pig. We wanted to find a person who would test different wake up methods. The mission was published as an online job ad, requesting all sleepyheads in Scandinavia to apply, or vote for candidates.

We then invited the audience to come up with ideas for wake-up methods, share and comment on the wake-up videos, and vote on their favorites in both social media and on the website.

The experiment boosted both sales and product awareness. Reactions to the campaign were many and very positive. It was shared by online news sites and bloggers in all Nordic markets, and in Sweden it was even featured on national public radio. The main reach, however, came from social media sharing and online word of mouth. The job ad went viral and attracted more than 2,100 applicants in three weeks, later attracting an additional 14,000 people to vote for who would get the job.

Extensive online PR coverage and social media sharing resulted in a total of more than 50m online impression, over 34,000 mentions in social media, 100,000 visitors to the microsite, and more than 80,000 video views during a period of 80 days (a 195% increase for Philip's YouTube channel compared to the entire previous year). In short, consumers in Scandinavia definitely knew that a new and improved Wake-up Light had reached the stores. The Christmas sales were highly improved compared to previous years, giving the Wake-up Light a staggering 99% market share in the Nordics for the crucial holiday sales.