On social media, users have commonly expressed their support for or against causes through shares, tweets and status updates. The term Slactivism has been used to brand these low-involvement activities, and as you would expect, there is much debate on whether creating awareness through social media via status updates truly benefits the cause.
With this is mind, the Swedish Armed Forces was wondering how they could attract young people to an occupation where they would have to give up their real comforts in order to help other people. They staged a scenario to determine how far people were willing to go for one another. A volunteer was placed inside a locked box in central Stockholm, they would have to stay in the box until someone willingly replaced him. Each hour a door would open; if someone was at the door the person could leave, if not they had to stay there for however long it took for someone to arrive to replace them.
A camera inside the box streamed live video of the volunteer to a live banner on YouTube, the Swedish Armed Forces website and on digital signage in the area. During the 89 hours of the experiment, 70 people stepped forward to free someone that they had never met.
The campaign was widely discussed on social media and the website drew over 100,000 visitors in 4 days. The goal of getting 4300 applications for 1430 positions was surpassed when they received 93000 applications, more than double their original goal.
The campaign was created by DDB Stockholm.
