Sweden: advertisements promoting the right to make a difference

In Sweden, an amazing advertising campaign for the railway company SJ and putting forward the right to difference was widely shared on social networks. Their first video reunited nearly 640,000 views in a month and the second, posted a week ago, is already at 40,000 views.

In the first video, we see Pelle Pia Hedberg, a man of about fifty. He sits on the train and seems to hesitate, wearing a brave smile and putting earrings and nail polish under the eye of the train's passengers. Arrived on the quay, he is a smiling, proud woman with in sound background the acoustic resumption of "This is the way" of the Swedish musician E-type.

If the video has accumulated so many views, it is because Pelle Pia Hedberg is known in Sweden for having been dismissed from his position of director of sales, when his hierarchy knew that he was transsexual. The fact that it shows itself as it is in public space is in itself a victory, as on the second video where we see Niklas Hillberg, a man with a mental handicap. In a similar staging, we hear him say that he is a little special, strong but not very courageous. Then he appears on a large theater stage, dressed as a lion and surrounded by other actors, playing the play of the Wizard of Oz.




These spots are very intimate and that is probably why they are successful. The railway company SJ places the journey as symbolic of the personal journey, all under the gaze of others, the benevolence of the passengers on the train that reassures. This is what is most evident on social networks, videos are seen as a reminder that society is multiple and must accommodate all the differences in the public space.

In general, Swedish advertisements tend to focus on comedy, the happiness of family life or performance. There is a pub that could be similar, that of H & M, which had a sports campaign, a hymn to performance, with a voice-over from a man who was Caitlyn Jenner, a former athlete wife. But there, with this campaign for SJ, no celebrity or great exploits but rather normal people, even on the margins of society, who show their doubts and then overcome the eyes of others.