GENERAL MARKETING: INNOVATIVE MEDIA & MARKETING/USE OF TECHNOLOGY/AI
Balticbest 2026 · 4 entries
Bronze
Bronze
How much IKEA in your kitchen
Entrant
MILK
Country
Lithuania
Brand
IKEA
Advertiser
IKEA
IKEA has long been synonymous with kitchen furniture in Lithuania, but furniture is rarely replaced — while smaller kitchen items like cookware, textiles, and accessories are bought frequently, and from anyone. To defend this territory, we turned a simple truth into a game: most people already own dozens of IKEA kitchen items without realizing it. The "Dream Kitchen" campaign invited people to photograph any IKEA item in their kitchen - from a spoon to a cabinet - and upload it to a dedicated site, where an AI model, trained to recognize nearly 2,000 different IKEA products, automatically verified it and issued a game ticket toward a €10,000 worth dream kitchen. The mechanic was deliberately built to drive purchase behavior: the more IKEA items people owned, the higher their odds, motivating shoppers to pick up small, inexpensive kitchen products specifically to boost their entries. Weekly €100 gift card giveaways kept engagement high throughout the campaign. The result: kitchen category sales grew 16.2% in euros and 7.7% in volume year-on-year, beating both targets, with 36,255 tickets submitted, and post-campaign research confirming 78% brand recognition and message linkage to IK...
Case Video
Bronze
DIGITAL MUSHROOM HUNT
Entrant
WKND
Country
Latvia
Brand
Tele2
Advertiser
Tele2
STRATEGIC INSIGHT
Tele2 has the widest network coverage in Latvia. Yet many people believe it only works in big cities. And they complain about it online. We could have responded with coverage maps or technical data. But instead, we invited people to test it themselves. In the middle of nowhere. To prove we’re everywhere.
INSIGHT
In Latvia, mushroom picking is a national obsession. Every autumn, thousands leave the cities and head deep into forests and remote areas to search for mushrooms. Places where mobile coverage is supposed to disappear.
IDEA
Introducing the first Digital Mushroom Hunt. An integrated campaign, built around an engaging mobile game powered by Tele2 internet. We divided the map of Latvia into tens of thousands of grid squares. Each one hiding digital mushrooms — redeemable for valuable prizes. To unlock a square, you had to physically go there and use your phone with Tele2 internet.
RESULTS & IMPACT
More than 27,000 people joined the hunt — a big number for a nation not known for jumping in. The most dedicated hunters collected up to 6,000 mushrooms. Together, they uncovered 72% of all mushroom zones — nearly the maximum possible, considering restricted areas...
Case StudyKey Visual of the campaignResults in numbersCampaign visual
Shortlist
Shortlist
PILDYK: Lithuania's First Branded Minecraft World
Entrant
Choco Agency
Country
Lithuania
Brand
PILDYK
Advertiser
Tele2 Lietuva, UAB
PILDYK already had young audiences' attention on social and YouTube – but attention isn't the same as belonging. The brand needed a reason for its youngest audience to spend real time with it, not just watch it.
The insight was already sitting in PILDYK's own YouTube data: Minecraft-related content consistently outperformed everything else on the channel. That wasn't a content signal – it was proof this audience didn't want to watch Minecraft, they wanted to be in it.
So instead of making another video, PILDYK built a place: Lithuania's first branded Minecraft server, a fully custom PILDYK world engineered to be lived in, not scrolled past – and built on the brand's own product logic. The in-game currency is GB, PILDYK's own mobile data, earned through daily tasks and NPC ambassador quests. PILDYK's own YouTube creators were rebuilt as in-game NPCs with original quest lines, set inside branded locations built as a real explorable world, with XP, levels, and monthly leaderboards paying out real PILDYK prizes. Scheduled live events let creators play alongside the community, and a connected Discord layer lets players directly shape the next quests and features – the world's own road...
Waste sorting haters are hating.
They don’t just ignore campaigns, they reject everything related to waste sorting. They complain about it, joke about it, and openly admit their frustration. For them, this isn’t a knowledge gap, it’s a mindset.
And that makes them almost impossible to reach.
Because traditional communication depends on attention. And this audience has already decided not to give it. They skip, scroll, and disengage the moment they recognize educational messaging.
So instead of begging for a moment of their attention, we gave them something they actually wanted, an offer they couldn’t refuse.
An option to unsubscribe from mandatory waste sorting.
“Want to get rid of waste sorting? Call this number.”
It didn’t look like a campaign. It looked like an escape. And they took it.
But the escape wasn’t real. It was a media system.
When people called, they were placed on hold, waiting for an operator who never picks up. And while they waited, they were exposed to a continuous stream of short, engaging lessons about waste sorting.
The longer they waited, the more they learned.
We didn’t interrupt them, we used their own action. We didn’t force attention, we made them step in...
