Beyond celebrating the best and most innovative work our industry has to offer, the Tomorrow Awards set up to let everybody know and understand the how behind every winning and shortlisted campaign.

Today we catch up with Kalle Akestam, copywriter at Swedish digital magicians Åkestam Holst to chat about the very fun How Hetero? campaign that taught the whole Twitterverse a new word last fall : Heteronormativy

How Hetero?

Tomorrow: Can you give us a bit of background on the campaign and your involvement in it?

Kalle: The Stockholm Pride Festival are one of those clients that go with different agency every year; it’s something that passes on in the industry. I started at the agency right after the summer break and the wheels were already in motion.

The TV spot, and the print ads were already done so I came just in time for when we started asking ourselves what the digital component of this campaign would be?

So I guess my involvement started at the beginning of last summer and worked a lot with Martin Cedergren, our creative director, who was already losing his hair over this.

Tomorrow: How did the idea to calculate how hetero everybody is came about?

Kalle: The theme for the pride festival was “heteronormativity”. Talking about the societal preconceptions about men and women etc. So that also needed to be the theme for our campaign. And after we kept talking about it, we thought it’d be fun to turn it around and see how you would compare to the so called norm.

Tomorrow: And did you build everything yourselves?

Kalle: No, there were different production companies involved for different parts of the campaign as everything was pro bono. So Martin had to call his friends saying “can you help us with something?” (laughs)

So there was a lot of outsourcing but  all the content was created in house. We had to invent ways to calculate everything, and write the databases that the users would be matched against as there was no frame of reference at all.

We had a database of thousands and thousands of words that we had the laborious task of writing down. It included everything from different types of music, books, pop culture, etc. If you were writing about it, the database will match it.

Every execution calculated the results differently. The Twitter app which was the first one we did matched words in your tweets only. The first Facebook one looked at words in your profile, interests and feeds.

and the second Facebook app matched pictures. And Honestly, I don’t know how that one calculates the matches! They developed it while I was doing an internship at another agency, but it was something about white balance and colours. How far from standard colour ranges are your pictures. I think. (laughs)

It was all done to show how ridiculous these preconceptions tend to be.

Tomorrow: And how did the client feel about the whole campaign and the reaction it got?

Kalle: Our main client for this was great. She’s loving the attention the campaign’s received and all the awards too! I think she’s the happiest of us all. But they were game all the way so a lot of the credit has to go to them.