Hemglass Turns a Jingle Into a Symphony to Reclaim Childhood Wonder
"The Grand Experience" is a 2014 Swedish radio campaign created by Volt Stockholm for Hemglass that reorchestrated the brand's long-running ice cream truck jingle using a full symphony orchestra and boys' choir to reconnect adult consumers with the childhood excitement of hearing Hemglassbilen arrive on their street.
Hemglass has operated its iconic Swedish ice cream truck — the Hemglassbilen — since 1969, building one of the country's most enduring sensory brand assets in the process. For more than four decades, the truck's looping jingle has signalled summer abundance to children across Sweden, while simultaneously testing the patience of their parents. By 2014, that generational tension had become the creative foundation for an entirely new kind of brand communication.
Volt Stockholm conceived "The Grand Experience" not as a product advertisement in the conventional sense but as an emotional reinstatement. The campaign targeted grown-up Swedes who had once sprinted toward the Hemglassbilen as children, asking them to revisit that precise feeling — and to bring that enthusiasm back to their own summer ice cream rituals. The strategic choice to work in radio, the most intimate and imagination-driven of broadcast media, was deliberate: sound had always been the brand's primary trigger, so sound would be the medium through which memory was unlocked.
The campaign launched in Sweden in June 2014 during week 25 of the broadcasting calendar, as reported by lovetheworkmore.com, and ran across three national commercial radio stations — NRJ, Rockklassiker, and Mix Megapol — for nine consecutive weeks. The creative execution centred on a 60-second flagship radiospot, supported by 25-second and 15-second versions, all built around the same symphonically arranged version of the Hemglass jingle. The campaign earned a Clapboard Score of 69 out of 100, reflecting solid craft and cultural resonance against an unusually constrained single-medium brief.
Hemglass identified a specific emotional gap between its youngest and oldest consumers. Children in Sweden needed no persuasion — the Hemglassbilen's jingle was already the most effective call-to-action the brand possessed. Adults, however, had mentally reclassified that same jingle as background noise or mild irritant, as noted in the campaign's own framing per trendhunter.com. The strategic challenge was therefore one of perception restoration rather than awareness building.
The insight driving "The Grand Experience" was precise: the ice cream truck jingle had not lost its power, it had simply been contextualised differently by age and repetition. By elevating the jingle from a tinny loop to a sweeping orchestral composition, Volt Stockholm proposed that the feeling — not the product — was the actual purchase driver for adult consumers. This approach placed Hemglass in a meaningfully different creative register from competitors operating in the Swedish ice cream market, including international brands such as GB Glace, the dominant retail ice cream brand in Sweden backed by Unilever's distribution network, and Magnum, whose premium positioning in Sweden relies heavily on indulgence imagery rather than emotional heritage.
Radio as a medium reinforced the strategy rather than limiting it. In Sweden, commercial radio reaches a substantial share of the adult population on a weekly basis, making it a credible vehicle for emotionally resonant storytelling. The Swedish ice cream category is acutely seasonal, with consumer demand concentrated in the summer months — precisely the window Hemglass targeted with a June launch. The choice to run for nine weeks across NRJ, Rockklassiker, and Mix Megapol, as documented by lovetheworkmore.com, ensured the campaign tracked the full arc of the Swedish summer consideration period, maximising the number of adults who would encounter the spot at precisely the moment ice cream was culturally relevant.
Music director and arranger Nils-Petter Ankarblom led the transformation of the Hemglass jingle into a full orchestral composition, as documented by lovetheworkmore.com. The arrangement was recorded with the Czech National Symphony Orchestra in Prague, bringing a production scale to a radio advertisement that would more typically be associated with film scoring or classical concert programming. The session captured the full dynamic range of the jingle — its familiar melodic contour preserved and amplified across strings, brass, and woodwind — before the recording was transported back to Stockholm for a final layer of completion.
Adolf Fredrik's Boys Choir, one of Stockholm's most historically recognised youth choral ensembles, provided the vocal element that completed the arrangement, per lovetheworkmore.com. The decision to use a boys' choir was not merely aesthetic. Children's voices anchored the composition emotionally to the demographic the campaign was trying to reach: adults whose formative memories of the Hemglassbilen were inseparable from the sounds of childhood summers in Sweden. The choir transformed what might otherwise have been an impressive but detached orchestral exercise into something genuinely affecting.
The production resulted in three broadcast-ready versions — a 60-second flagship radiospot, a 25-second edit, and a 15-second edit — each structurally complete rather than simply truncated, ensuring the emotional arc remained intact regardless of placement duration. The decision to invest in this level of production for an audio-only campaign speaks directly to Volt Stockholm's reading of the brief: the medium demanded to be taken seriously precisely because Hemglass's entire brand equity had always lived in sound. The creative approach demonstrated that the Swedish advertising industry's engagement with the radiospot format remained sophisticated and production-committed even as digital channels attracted increasing budget share.
"The Grand Experience" won two Lions at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in 2014. The campaign received a Silver Lion in the Radio category, entry reference B01/066, and a Bronze Lion in category A14/072, as recorded by clapboard.com. For a single-medium radio campaign produced for a Swedish ice cream truck brand, this dual recognition at the world's most scrutinised advertising award show constitutes a meaningful measure of creative and strategic effectiveness. Cannes Lions juries at that time evaluated radio entries on the distinctiveness of the idea, the craft of the production, and the degree to which the medium itself was used with intentionality — criteria that "The Grand Experience" addressed directly on all three counts.
No verified third-party consumer performance data for "The Grand Experience" — such as brand lift figures, recall scores, or sales uplift metrics — is publicly available. What the campaign's structure makes structurally arguable is reach efficiency: nine weeks across three of Sweden's most-listened-to commercial stations, with a creative execution designed to generate earned attention through the unexpectedness of its production scale, represents a media strategy likely to have delivered repeated adult impressions through a period of high category relevance. The Clapboard Score of 69 out of 100 reflects that the campaign succeeded in elevating an overlooked medium with genuine craft, while acknowledging that single-medium audio work, however well executed, operates within inherent reach constraints relative to integrated campaigns.
"The Grand Experience" is a 2014 Swedish radio campaign by Volt Stockholm for Hemglass. It reimagined the Hemglassbilen's iconic jingle as a full symphonic composition recorded with the Czech National Symphony Orchestra and Adolf Fredrik's Boys Choir, targeting adults nostalgic for childhood summers awaiting the ice cream truck.
Music arranger Nils-Petter Ankarblom created the orchestral arrangement. The piece was recorded with the Czech National Symphony Orchestra in Prague and completed with Adolf Fredrik's Boys Choir in Stockholm, as documented by lovetheworkmore.com. The arrangement formed the sonic core of all three radiospot versions produced for the campaign.
"The Grand Experience" won two Lions at Cannes 2014. The campaign received a Silver Lion in the Radio category, entry B01/066, and a Bronze Lion in category A14/072, as recorded by clapboard.com. This dual recognition made it one of the most awarded Swedish radio campaigns of that year's festival.
The campaign broadcast on NRJ, Rockklassiker, and Mix Megapol for nine weeks beginning in week 25 of 2014, per lovetheworkmore.com. The June launch aligned with Sweden's peak ice cream season. Three versions aired: a 60-second flagship radiospot alongside 25-second and 15-second edits.
Hemglass's core brand asset is the Hemglassbilen jingle, which has played from the ice cream truck since 1969. Sound was already the brand's primary consumer trigger, making radio the natural medium for a campaign built on auditory memory and adult nostalgia for Swedish childhood summers spent chasing the ice cream truck.
Hemglassbilen is Hemglass's Swedish ice cream truck, operating since 1969. Its looping jingle has signalled the truck's arrival to children across Sweden for more than four decades, making it one of the country's most recognisable audio brand identities — simultaneously beloved by children and, as the campaign acknowledges, occasionally irritating to adults.
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