Därför hade Visit Sweden slängt ut mig ur arbetsgruppen

Before sitting down to write this, I spent a couple of hours this evening surfing glassy waves somewhere in the Baltic Sea. Exactly where is nothing that I would ever share with any of you reading this. Not because the particular place was secret, but because a lot of the places I surf are, and out of respect to those who have spent years and decades finding these gems, where one surfs is never shared. I am sure chanterelle pickers understand this, though I wouldn’t know because I don’t pick chanterelles, officially.

LÄS ÄVEN: Använde Ikeas toalettborste för att boosta sjön – vinner överlägset

You don’t have to surf to understand that Sweden is a crazy, unique place. Kilometres of coastline you can have to yourself, early summer when everything is in bloom and the sun never really sets, and the north. Yeah, cool, I don’t need to sell Sweden to any of you. But Visit Sweden does.

My instinct is that the uniqueness of this place should be kept secret. That’s what I would have said to Visit Sweden if they were my client and they would’ve probably asked if I could be replaced with someone who has the ability to comprehend the economic value of cash carrying tourists walking around these uninhabited coastlines holding selfie-sticks like it was 2015.

The genius in Discover the Originals is only partly due to flipping the curse of Ikea and letting a plastic toilet brush sell a beautiful lake to a Portuguese couple into Nordic noir crime novels. The genius is in how it presents Sweden, the undersell of expectations that feed into an over delivery of experience, and the deployment of kooky Swedish humour to find the right kind of tourists who, if they choose to visit Sweden after seeing this campaign, deserve to experience something worth keeping secret.