Appreciate Your Holiday Weather with This Machine That Mimics the Bad Weather Back Home

When the Danes go on vacation, they enjoy it a lot more knowing that the weather back home is bad - when you live in the cold north, the weather means everything. 

When Danes say that the Danish summer is the best day of the year, it’s not really a joke. This might be one of the reasons why Danes love to travel to exotic destinations, even during the summer. A new survey shows that 47% of Danes admit that they enjoy their holidays a lot more when the weather back home is bad. This feeling is called Shadenfreude: ‘the experience of pleasure, joy, or self-satisfaction that comes from learning or witnessing the troubles, failures, or humiliation of another’.

Danish agency Robert/Boisen & Like-minded (RBLM) and its client Spies Travel - who previously launched the successful ‘Do It for Denmark’ campaign - looked to make feeling Shadenfreude even easier for Danes. 

It’s one thing is to see a weather report, but another thing entirely to feel it on your own body. So RBLM invited people to experience their actual home weather on an exotic beach in Thailand. By entering in their hometown, the machine could replicate the actual home weather using real time data from an online weather service. The computer then translated the data into a simulation with all kinds of bad weather from rain and wind to thunder and lightning, fog and snow. They also added a little extra rainwater all the way from Denmark to make the experience even more authentic. We turned the event into a film, and hopefully it will inspire people to book their next holiday and escape the home weather.

The campaign film isn’t just running in Denmark, but also in seven other countries: Denmark (Spies), Norway (Ving) Sweden (Ving) and Finland (Tjäreborg) but also Holland, Belgium and Germany (Neckermann) and finally England (Thomas Cook).

The Home Weather Machine was developed in collaboration with Playground Marketing, who created the simulator in Aarhus, Denmark before it was shipped to Thailand.