For the Swedish Alpine Ski Team, climate change became extremely obvious when the hunt for snow became harder and harder. Knowing that their traveling lifestyle has negative effects on the climate, the team joined forces with sponsor Vattenfall to cut their climate impact in half by 2022.

Bonnier News Brand Studio went along for the ride and created The National Team of Climate campaign to spread the word.

In the words of Jens Byggmark, former Swedish alpine skier and host of the commercial television series “The National Team of Climate”: “If there are no glaciers, we cannot ski. Things have to be done, and it has to be done today. Why not start with us, because if everybody does something, we can make a change.” 

In the series, Jens and the television team from Bonnier News Brand Studio travel to the hometowns of five members of the Swedish Alpine Ski Team with one mission: to reduce their climate impact. 

The skiers, including Olympic winners Frida Hansdotter and André Myhrer, are challenged in different areas: home, community, car, shopping, and meat. To help, they have experts and the app One Tonne Future, created by Vattenfall, which provides an easy way to calculate your personal climate impact and see how you can reduce it.

The native campaign was a successful collaboration between Bonnier News Brand Studio, Vattenfall, the Alpine Ski Team, and media agency OMD. As Sweden’s largest producer of renewable energy as well as a sponsor of the Swedish Alpine Ski Team, Vattenfall decided to help the skiers with their goals. Bonnier’s role was to put Vattenfall in a new, fresh context; lift the collaboration; and inspire the Swedish people to change their habits for the climate. 

Alongside the TV series, we created additional native articles that targeted different aspects of the subject. We also created a competition to win even more engagement from the audience. All of it was distributed on a custom-made campaign Web site and spread through our platforms Expressen and Dagens Nyheter, two of the largest newspapers in Scandinavia. We also published videos on Expressen’s main account on Facebook and created special editions of the videos for Vattenfall’s social media. On top of that, the skiers published videos on their own social media.

One of the most-read articles was an interview with host Jens Byggmark. This was actually the first time he talked about the future and his years as a top athlete since he stepped down from his elite career. For Byggmark, as well as the audience, the work with the campaign was an eye-opener.

“I learned so much by working with the climate experts and the skiers,” Byggmark said. “One of the things I am taking with me is how stupid it is to buy bottled water in a country like Sweden, and I am also walking and taking the bus more often instead of my car. My family and I have also started to eat more vegetarian. These are small changes that everyone can make that actually will make a difference.”

What made this campaign so special was not only the personal approach, but also the realness of the whole story and the problem itself. We created a story experience around a real problem to help and inspire people to make the small changes we all need to make if we are going to stand a chance against climate change. 

The campaign reached almost 1 million pageviews and 1.2 million streams — quite a lot in a country with just 10 million people. If all of these people make some small changes in their lives, this campaign will live on and truly make a change for the better.

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