Time-free island was a marketing campaign
The story of Sommarøy, the small "time-free" Norwegian island in the idyllic land of the midnight sun, was yesterday revealed to be a marketing campaign.
It was reported that "the island with no time zone" wanted to declare itself as the world's first time-free zone, and were taking their case to the Norwegian parliament. But although some inhabitants of Sommarøy backed the campaign, the idea was not theirs. NRK.no revealed yesterday that the initiative to make Sommarøy a time-free zone was in fact a carefully planned marketing campaign, hatched by the government-owned Innovation Norway.
The story has been covered in more than 1650 articles in 1479 different media, including CNN, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Independent, Time, El País, La Repubblica, Vanity Fair and Der Spiegel, potentially reaching 1.2 billion people. The value of the coverage is estimated to 11.4 million USD - a pretty good return on investment for Innovation Norway, which spent less than 60,000 USD on the campaign.
Sommarøy will stay on CET/CEST like the rest of Norway, but visitors are still encouraged to leave their clocks at home, as long as they check out of their hotel in time.
Time in Sommarøy now: https://time.is/Sommarøy
