Netflix – Against The Ice

Encouraging individuals to engage with Netflix is a distinct challenge compared to guiding them towards selecting a particular film from the extensive library of options available. This prompts the question: How can the visibility of “Against the Ice” be effectively increased?

It’s important to note that securing a spot on the global streaming service doesn’t automatically ensure success. Local productions face competition not only from major international projects with substantial budgets but also from other local streaming platforms.

The campaign’s primary objective was to promote viewership of “Against The Ice,” Netflix’s inaugural Danish film production, specifically targeting the Danish population.

The campaign aimed at getting the Danish population to watch Netflix’s first Danish movie production: Against The Ice – But how do we manage that?

We categorized fans of co-stars Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Joe Cole, and the book “A Dangerous Solo Expedition” as the target audience. Given that historical films doesn’t outperform other genres on the platform, we realised that Danes’ love of Coster-Waldau wouldn’t be enough to sell the idea of an old Greenland expedition to the Danish people.

Together with Orbit Red, we decided to flip the film’s challenge to an opportunity. For what do millions of Danes have in common? Danish history.

Against the Ice is about two Danish polar explorers who struggle to survive after being abandoned in Greenland in 1910. We understood that we were dealing with a unique story. At the time, when it became known to the world that the two polar explorers were alive, the story was “breaking news” and featured on all the daily newspapers front pages.

Our strategy was to bring our target group back to that sensation. We designed the media campaign to bring Danes back to the euphoria and mood that hit Denmark 110 years ago. So, we decided to ‘break’ the news one more time.

On launch day, we took over the front page of Danish broadsheet Politiken, with a reprint of the original front page story from 1912. This was the first time ever, that Politiken sold their front page to advertising.

We activated the campaign by paperboys and old-fashioned cars that took over the streets of Copenhagen, shouting out the world news and distributing Politiken’s newspaper to passers-by. Since the collaboration with Politiken was centred around the launch day, we even created a separate limited-edition Netflix newspaper, which was distributed by paperboys before and after the launch. We dressed the city walls of Copenhagen with 2000 posters with original covers that looked like those used by newspapers in 1912.

Copenhagen’s old newspaper towers, which today function as cafés, were brought back to their traditional form with the original newspapers in the windows. The Netflix newspaper was distributed with every cup of coffee sold.