Both on SKF's own YouTube channel. English, launched late March 2025.
SKF is a 118-year-old Swedish company that makes bearings. Industrial, unglamorous, essential, and almost impossible to make anyone care about. The standard B2B answer is a case study PDF and a stand at a trade show.
The insight NORD DDB found is not about bearings, it is about attention. We have collectively agreed that space is where the exciting engineering happens. Billionaires with rockets get documentaries; the people quietly solving energy on this planet get a trade press mention. Meanwhile the largest untapped power source affecting Earth is not out there at all, it is the moon, and its energy arrives here every day as the tide. Nobody had framed tidal power as space technology. It just needed the language.
Start a space program that never leaves Earth.
SKF, tidal developer Minesto and Faroese utility SEV launched the Faroe Islands Space Program: a real energy project, presented with the full grammar of space exploration. The underwater tidal kites become spacecraft. They fly, they are piloted, they harvest the moon's gravitational energy. Every bit of it is literally true. They just refused to describe it in the boring register the category expects.
The kites are anchored to the seabed off the Faroe Islands and fly figure-eights through the tidal current at speeds several times the flow, generating electricity. SKF's contribution is the bearings and seals that survive a machine pulling around 3.5g underwater in the North Atlantic, forever, with no one able to pop out and service it.
Then it was rolled out as a program rather than a campaign: mission branding, a documentary and technical film series, a dedicated site, and press pitched to science and technology desks rather than marketing ones. It landed in BBC, BILD and Interesting Engineering. The engineering detail became the content, right down to working out which paint stays on a kite pulling 3.5g in seawater.
The stupid: a bearings manufacturer announces a space program. From an archipelago of 54,000 people. That does not go to space. Then it spends its budget on documentary films about underwater kites instead of the trade advertising and conference presence every one of its competitors is buying.
The smart: the metaphor is not a metaphor, which is the entire trick. Tidal energy genuinely is moon energy; the kites genuinely are piloted craft flying through a fluid; SKF's parts genuinely are the bit that has to survive the hostile environment. Nothing had to be exaggerated, so nothing can be debunked. And it targets exactly the right thing: in heavy industry the buying decision is slow, technical and made by engineers who are bored senseless by marketing. Give those engineers something they want to send to another engineer, and you have solved distribution and credibility in one move.
The steal: before you invent a story, check whether a true and unused description of your product already exists. SKF did not fabricate a space program. It found the framing that was accurate and unclaimed and simply started using it out loud. That is the cheapest big idea there is, and it is sitting unused in most briefs.
Worth noting that this won Creative B2B, a category that mostly rewards work that is merely competent-for-B2B. This one would have held up in any category, which is the real compliment. The excuse "our category is boring" is almost always a research problem, not a category problem.
Plus a reported 500 million-plus potential earned reach. Straight talk: these are the entry figures supplied by SKF and NORD DDB, and "potential reach" is always the softest number in any case study. The media placement count and the named outlets are the ones I would actually lean on.
Client: SKF (CEO Rickard Gustafson), with Minesto and SEV
Agency: NORD DDB, Stockholm
CCO: Andreas Dahlqvist
Creative directors: Simon Higby, Linnéa Lofjord
Art directors: Carl Laurén, Linn Löfholm · Copywriter: Ida Nordeng
Strategy director: Owen Hughes
Production: House (DoP Daniel Takacs) · Post/VFX: Current Occupation
Digital: Digital Fans · Music and sound: Ponytail (composer Høgni Reistrup)
Contagious, Cannes Lions 2026 Creative B2B winners
Ads of the World, case study and credits
LBB, why NORD DDB and SKF built an underwater space programme
SKF Group official channel
The devices behind this one, from our library of ways in: