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Broccoli vs. Opera
Folkoperan

How to get children to self-willingly choose opera?

Folkoperan is an opera house in Stockholm that is always striving to revitalize opera and attract new audiences. Unfortunately, there is a dwindling interest for opera globally and therefore it’s important for opera houses around the world to ignite the interest of younger generations.

Well aware of this problem, we quickly realized that we found ourselves in a challenging situation when setting up Coraline, an opera for kids.So, in order to get kids to attend the opera, we turned to the one thing kids dislike even more – broccoli.

We decided to conduct an experiment and had 30 kids to choose between broccoli and opera. In the end, opera stood victorious. In order to spread these remarkable news, we took the broccoli-method to the streets and handed out broccolis with instructional tags, challenging families to either boil or book.

But we didn’t stop there. We raised even more awareness by putting broccoli’s on subway ads, urging parents to try the broccoli-method themselves. It didn’t take long before news of the campaign were picked up across the globe and, in the end, Coraline was as good as sold out and the campaign got 1,1 million media impressions worldwide.

The Broccoli vs. Opera case was nominated in The Webby Awards in the category Advertising, Media & PR: Best Use of Earned Media.