United Imaginations Brands Turku Archipelago as the World's Best-Smelling Place

United Imaginations, led by executive creative director Mikko Hakkarainen, built a campaign positioning the Turku archipelago as the world's best-smelling destination, aiming to introduce a region familiar to Finns but largely unknown abroad. The agency deliberately avoided the scenic-beauty clichés of travel advertising, pairing the olfactory claim with oddball Finnish and Nordic humor. The client embraced the unconventional approach, accepting the risk with a go-big-or-go-home mandate. French actor Lambert Wilson appears in the campaign film, and his small departures from form were treated as essential to the tone, which Hakkarainen describes as serious about the claim yet not about itself. Production was compressed to one and a half shooting days, forcing the team to concentrate all locations within the Pargas and Nagu area as a stand-in for an archipelago of 40,000 islands. French audiences responded warmly on social media, a lesson Hakkarainen cites alongside the need for crystal-clear vision and execution. Given another chance, the team would add more Easter eggs, including a planned shot of a displeased Emmanuel Macron sipping Finnish coffee that went unproduced.