Tourism is Iceland’s top industry and during 2021, after over a year of lockdown, leisure travel finally started to become possible again. But search interest remained consistently low for Iceland, and despite predictions charting tourism recovery for 2023, Iceland had to act to recapture tourism dollars and help revitalize its economy.

Visit Iceland needed to increase top-of-mind awareness and preference as a destination over other desirable locations, despite being consistently outspent by competitors with bigger mass media budgets. They needed to break through with low-cost, high-impact, culturally relevant content and motivate travellers to choose Iceland as the first place to visit post-vaccine, without significant marketing spend.

When social media couldn’t stop talking about Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement of his new virtual reality Metaverse, the team saw the perfect opportunity to put Iceland’s actual reality at the centre of the conversation.