With world travel surging in 2022, Iceland needed to lure tourists away from bigger competitors with bigger pocketbooks. It would take a PR-worthy idea to win coverage outside the travel pages and earn enough eyeballs to offset Iceland’s tiny budget. Our earned-first approach to creative and PR led to the video racking up nearly half a million views shortly after launch, and it was covered by some of the biggest news publications in the world—The Independent and The Washington Post, to name a few. This led to over 3.7 billion impressions with $6.8 million in earned media.

You know what’s even less fun than reading hundreds of award-show entries in your downtime from work? Answering hundreds of emails in your downtime from work.

And while world travel was surging in 2022, so was the always-on work culture. Working from anywhere meant work could literally follow travelers everywhere. According to a March 2022 study, 60% of us check work email on vacation. Some destinations were even pitching themselves as places to work remotely, and publications coined awful phrases like “Paid Time On.” Gross.

Meanwhile Iceland needed a relevant, PR-worthy idea to lure tourists away from bigger competitors with bigger pocketbooks. They had to win coverage outside the travel pages to earn enough eyes to offset Iceland’s tiny budget.

Our brief was to take on this abominable burn-out culture and create a buzzworthy idea that would get Iceland on the map as a glorious work-free getaway.

How many emails have you gotten today? Of those emails, how many were annoying?

Visit Iceland devised an innovative solution to this stupid modern problem: OutHorse Your Email, a revolutionary service where Icelandic horses write real out-of-office email replies.

We built a fully functional, horse-sized keyboard and enlisted actual Icelandic horses to type by trotting over it.

Vacationers simply had to go to OutHorseYourEmail.com, select their favorite horse, and get their corporate gobbledygook straight from the horses’ hooves.

A launch video played up the frustrations of having to work 24/7. And of course, it had a lot of extremely cute horses typing total nonsense. A behind-the-scenes video proved that the horses were actually typing and not slacking off.

Travelers could relax in Iceland, knowing horses were replying to their bosses with messages like:

‘’’’Bdqtde’d+pi

And:

fþbuerggæmhyrojukl.u,.,i-;’[=’’/=\[]p

See? They know all the office lingo.

The new reality of working from anywhere, brought on by the pandemic, now meant work could follow all of us everywhere. Using survey data, we found that 60% of people check work email on vacation.

That’s what compelled us to build a fully functional, horse-sized keyboard so that Icelandic horses could type out-of-office email replies by trotting over it. Iceland’s unique breed of horses provided an unexpected way to alleviate travelers’ frustrations.

We produced a video introducing the OutHorse Your Email service, weaving in the very topical and relatable frustrations of having a constant inbox onslaught. A press release and toolkit in the brand tone included a making-of video showing the keyboard construction.

Our key messages focused on statistics about working on vacation and the very real sense of escape one could experience soaking in Iceland’s hot springs, taking in the natural surroundings, and enjoying the culture.

OutHorse Your Email launched to help travelers enjoy Iceland's scenic beauty without email distractions. Real Icelandic horses were trained to type on a horse-sized keyboard to create out-of-office reply emails people could use on vacation. Anyone could visit the website to get their email OutHorsed, read the horses’ backstories, and discover things to do in Iceland.

With a focus on media coverage ahead of summer vacation, the campaign was promoted through a tongue-in-cheek press release and a global toolkit that armed local markets with video and still assets to make a big bang moment at launch. Our aim was to generate mass coverage with a media focus on print, online, and broadcast across target markets and global publications. In key media titles, we provided interview time with Sigríður Dögg Guðmundsdóttir from Inspired by Iceland and Jelena Ohm from Horses of Iceland, allowing bigger feature pieces beyond the initial launch announcement.

3.7B impressions

$6.8M in AVE (media value of impressions)

100% positive sentiment

89.7% of viewers found the work enjoyable

82.2% of viewers found the work worth sharing

21K+ OutHorsed emails, using real horse-typed language

16.8% increase in travel intent to Iceland after seeing the OutHorse video

In a Swayable consumer study measuring participants who saw our creative vs. a control group who did not, the campaign increased the number of participants who intend to plan or book a trip to Iceland by 16.8% in US.

7.2% Increase in rank Iceland first over competitors

Baseline: 10.7%

14.6% increase in recommend for Iceland

Starting from a solid baseline of 61.8%, our audience was already somewhat likely to recommend Iceland. So we’d already won with those most likely to recommend us, and every subsequent gain would be harder fought and more meaningfully won.

Our audience was burnt out, overworked, and in need of a vacation. A big reason is because the lines between work and life, which blurred during the pandemic, hadn’t come back into focus. Most travelers were working on their so-called “relaxing vacations.” This mindset existed long before the pandemic, but it has been exacerbated by remote ways of working.

Destinations, and the larger cultural narrative, doubled down on this awful “Work From Vacation” mindset, coining phrases like “Paid Time On” and “Workcations.”

In contrast, Iceland was winning headlines for piloting a four-day work week to tremendous success. Since then, 86% of Iceland’s workforce are working shorter hours or gaining the right to shorten their hours (8). Iceland’s unique position on work gave us credibility in the work-life balance conversation.