ICE - Folkets skiskytterlue

ICE wanted a hat. More precisely they wanted the public to design one, for the Norwegian biathlon season. This was a few years ago now and I don't remember the brief in much detail, but the shape of it was an activation, something to get people touching the brand instead of scrolling past it.

The whole thing had to run inside a banner, and that constraint shaped everything else. A hat designer is a real interface. You need to pick colours, pick patterns, see what you're making, change your mind, and all of it has to happen in a box on someone's phone that's a fraction of the size you'd get building an app.

The hard part was the preview. Letting someone choose a pattern and a set of colours is easy enough on its own, but a flat swatch of the result doesn't tell you anything. It had to look like the actual hat, on the actual shape, with its actual light and shadow, or nobody would care about what they'd just made.

So the patterns needed to recolour on the fly and then sit convincingly on a photo of a real hat. I got there with blending modes in HTML, layering the recoloured pattern over the hat so it picked up the shading and the folds underneath instead of sitting flat on top of it. That took longer than anything else in the build, and it's the part that made the rest of it worth doing.

The campaign ran on the season. The designer went out at the start, then at the end a committee shortlisted the entries and we ran a voting creative so the public could pick a winner. The winning hat got made and used the following year. We went round that loop a few times.

I programmed both creatives, the designer and the voting round. ICE had their own designers in house and they produced a lot of the visuals, so this was a lot of back and forth with them rather than me deciding how it looked. My side was making it work.

Across the runs I have numbers for it did around 28 million impressions and about 600,000 interactions. Around 11,000 people actually started building a hat, which sounds small next to 28 million, but designing something is a much bigger ask than tapping a banner.

The voting rounds pulled far more engagement than the designer did, roughly sixteen times as many interactions. That makes sense though. Voting is one tap and designing a hat isn't, so I wouldn't read much into the gap.

The best part is that the winning hats got made. Craft produced them and they went out into the world as real hats, which is a nicer ending than most things I've built inside an ad.