We helped the Discrimination Board refine its messaging and raise awareness through concept development, digital marketing, design, animation, and content.
Through clear and eye-catching concepts, easy-to-understand animated videos, and emotionally resonant articles, we helped the Norwegian Equality and Anti-Discrimination Tribunal become better known and better understood by its target audience.
As the name suggests, the Discrimination Board plays an important role in society; its mission is to combat discrimination and harassment.
The Board has the legal authority to rule on complaints regarding discrimination and harassment, and may also award compensation or restitution. The main advantage of bringing your case before the Discrimination Board is that the process is completely free and fully digital.
When we began our collaboration, the Discrimination Board was a relatively new body, and awareness of its name and mission was low. They felt that too few complaints were being filed relative to the challenges they knew existed in society. We were therefore tasked with helping the Discrimination Board become better known among the general public and among certain specific target groups in particular.
Our solution was the ad campaign titled“WRONG BECOMES RIGHT.” The animated ads were designed to both grab attention and convey an important message—in a way that would make people stop and take notice, and that might be a bit unexpected coming from this source.
We produced three different ads:
Filing a complaint is a major decision for those who have been treated unfairly or harassed. It is therefore important that they know as much as possible about what it entails. The digital process can also be difficult to understand, and the requirement to log in with BankID can also be a barrier to moving forward
We produced two animated explanatory videos that made it easier to understand the process and what can be appealed, and that helped remove the barriers to filing an appeal.
Since the Anti-Discrimination Tribunal’s communications must strike a balance between different groups in society (it is easy to discriminate through communication as well), we developed a visual style that neutralizes ethnicity and gender.
We worked closely with the client on both the script and the storyboard for the videos. The first video explains what happens when you file a complaint, while the second provides a more detailed explanation of what discrimination and harassment actually are. The videos have been produced in Norwegian, English, Polish, and Arabic.
The Discrimination Board publishes all its decisions on its website, but what are in reality raw, human stories are often hidden behind legal jargon and statutory provisions. To engage the target audience, we created a campaign that highlighted these emotional and authentic stories
The client identified the topics where they believed there was the greatest underreporting—that is, where there was the widest gap between actual incidents and the number of complaints they received. We then reviewed the decisions and selected representative stories with emotional resonance that could be told effectively while maintaining complete anonymity. Since the emotional hook was crucial, we chose to produce the articles as scrollytelling. That is, articles with large images and shorter but engaging text that the reader scrolls through. Scrollytelling is actively used by newsrooms because it often results in longer reading times, greater emotional impact, and more engagement than “regular” articles.
We produced, published, and promoted two story-driven content articles, in Norwegian and English, for the Discrimination Tribunal:
Could the school have stopped the bullying?
Wasn’t allowed on the plane—was it because of my skin color?
The campaign was partly run contextually in Norwegian online newspapers through our programmatic platform. This means that the ads target the audience based on the selection of topics, words, and phrases, rather than demographic data such as age and location. The ads were designed to look like news articles, but were, of course, clearly marked as sponsored content.
The goal of the contextual ads was to target precisely, not broadly, and the selection of topics and keywords that triggered the ads was somewhat narrow. This also affected the impression numbers. The impression numbers were low, but the click-through rate (CTR) was well above the benchmark for programmatic advertising:
Views of the bullying article: 37,391
Views of the airport article: 36,948
Number of clicks on the bullying article: 83
Number of clicks on the airport article: 157
Click-through rate (CTR) for bullying article: 0.22%
Click-through rate (CTR) for airport article: 0.43%
We have also assisted the Discrimination Board with plain language initiatives, presentations, and general communication and marketing strategies.
