Visit Finland Launches 'Chill Like A Finn' Challenge on Social Media

Developed by the creative brand studio SEK with the Visit Finland team, the Chill Like a Finn 7 Day challenge is a social-first campaign built around a bold idea: the audience is the campaign. Targeting key European markets and designed to grow international travel to Eastern Finland’s Lakeland region, the activation flips the traditional destination marketing model on its head.

Rebuilding International Travel to Eastern Finland

Eastern Finland’s travel sector has faced a perfect storm of pressures in recent years. The aftermath of COVID-19, the closure of the Russian border, rising operational costs, and over-reliance on domestic visitors. With Russian travellers historically making up a significant share of international arrivals, the region urgently needed to diversify its audience and capture the imagination of new travellers.

The strategic response: reposition Lakeland not as a remote Northern European destination, but as the place where the world’s happiest people — according to the UN — choose to spend their summers. The insight was deceptively simple: Finns ranked number one for happiness not despite their lifestyle, but because of it. And nowhere is that lifestyle more visible than in the Finnish summer: lake swims, saunas, long evenings, and an unapologetic commitment to slowing down.

A Social Casting Call the World Could Join

Instead of producing a campaign about Lakeland, the team designed a campaign that invited the world to imagine it.

To enter, participants need to create a short video on TikTok or Instagram answering one question, “What do you think summer at Finnish Lakeland looks like?” Entries are submitted in pairs, reflecting the social and shared nature of the Lakeland experience, using the hashtag #ChillLikeAFinn for the chance to win a real 7-day trip to Finland.

The mechanics are engineered for organic growth. Every application will be simultaneously a piece of content, a personal story, and an invitation for others to participate. As entries multiply across feeds — from dreamy sauna fantasies to midnight swim sequences — each video adds another layer to a collectively imagined portrait of Finnish summer.

“Instead of telling people what summer in Finnish Lakeland looks like, we asked social media to imagine it. By designing the campaign as a social-first casting call, we turned audiences into creators, sparking a wave of user-generated videos that collectively built the story of Lakeland summer across TikTok and Instagram,” said Enoma Edevbaro, head of social media and influencer marketing, SEK / Part of GREY.Content

Built to Spread

To ignite the challenge, Visit Finland launched three social-native content formats across its owned channels, each designed for the vertical, short-form environment of TikTok and Instagram:

• Tease: A teaser film seeding the idea of Finnish Lakeland as the world's happiest summer destination
• Launch: A campaign launch film opening the challenge to global audiences
• Inspire: An example entry video demonstrating how to apply and encouraging peer participation

Rather than relying on traditional media amplification, the campaign was architected around creator participation and peer-to-peer sharing. The goal: a self-sustaining social stream of user interpretations, sauna dreams, mornings of canoeing, and midnight sun rituals that builds a composite, crowd-authored image of Finnish summer.

Cultural Authenticity to Earn Earned Media

The campaign’s cultural resonance was validated on launch day itself. Finland’s national broadcaster YLE covered the activation, specifically noting that the concept emerges from real Finnish summer habits, not a marketing department’s wish list. That editorial endorsement set the tone for the campaign: authentic, socially native, and rooted in genuine cultural behaviour rather than aspirational lifestyle imagery. The campaign has also been picked up by global outlets such as Condé Nast Traveler.

By structuring the campaign as a living, participatory challenge rather than a broadcast message, Visit Finland is transforming its audience from passive viewers into active storytellers and turning the Lakeland summer into a globally co-created narrative.

“Eastern Finland is home to Europe’s largest lake region, thousands of cottages, diverse accommodation, countless saunas, and landscapes that are part of the Finnish identity. At the same time, the core of Visit Finland’s brand is to create experiences for visitors that speak to the emotions and senses — giving travel a deeper meaning. This time, we’re following the conversation where it already lives: in social media,” said Virva Katajala, head of marketing, Visit Finland.