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Book a meetingOver the past year we have scaled Scandinavian brands into Europe and the US. And it is very different from the home market here in Scandinavia. One of our clients profitably spent 1 000 000 kr per day on ads in Europe alone. I do not think there is a bigger growth opportunity available today.
A quick note on who is behind this: we are Curve, a performance agency managing 15M+ EUR in monthly ad spend across 20+ Scandinavian brands. We have scaled clients like Collagen for Hund (10x sales growth), Propr.no (252% higher bottom line) and Nicotinos (pan-European expansion). Everything below is taken straight from how we actually work.
Most agencies that can handle one market struggle to deliver across several. When you take a Scandinavian brand out into the world, you are suddenly working across language, cultural context and currency, all at once. Every market has its own consumer psychology and its own path to purchase. Here is the sequence we follow once the system at home is already delivering and you are ready to expand.
You have picked the market. Now you need to understand it. This is the step most people skip, and it is why they fail.
We read Reddit and forums in the target market before we touch a brief. That is where people talk honestly about their problems, in their own words, without knowing a marketer is reading. You capture the actual language, the actual objections and the actual micro-moments of frustration. It is gold for hooks and angles, and it reveals how sophisticated the market really is.
Here is how we do it:
This is the most important point in the entire document, and it is the reason things that work in Norway often fall flat in a new market.
A market moves through five levels of sophistication, based on how much advertising it has already seen in your category. Most larger markets tend to sit several levels ahead of Norway. An audience in a mature market within weight, health or beauty has heard absolutely everything before. A Norwegian audience may not have. If you take a message that works in a low-sophistication Norwegian market and run it raw in a more mature market, you are talking to people who have seen the same claim a thousand times, and you get ignored.
Nobody is advertising this yet. Ads state the need or the claim outright, plain and simple. It sounds like this: "New toothpaste removes yellow stains."
The same claims, but bigger. Everyone outbids each other. It sounds like this: "Removes yellow stains in 7 days, or your money back."
Pure exaggeration no longer works, so ads start explaining a unique mechanism, meaning how the product works, not just what it does. It sounds like this: "The active enzyme X dissolves stains while you sleep."
Several competitors have their own mechanism, and they keep expanding it: faster, easier, safer. Direct comparisons appear (think Mac vs. PC). It sounds like this: "Same enzyme, twice as fast, without sensitivity."
The market has been bombarded for years and no longer believes any claim. Ads now lean mostly on identification with the customer, recognition over promise. It sounds like this: "For you who have tried everything and are tired of being disappointed."
How to find the level: research the competitors in the target market. Which claims are they running? Are they still talking about what the product does, or have they moved on to mechanism, comparisons or pure identification? That tells you which stage the market is at. And almost every time, you will find it sits well ahead of where Norway is.
Once you have read the market, look for the gaps. We go in hard where the current competition is weak or lagging, because that is where you can take a big bite fast.
A market where competitors are still running lazy, generic ads is a market where good creative stands out immediately. You do not need to be the best in the world, you just need to be clearly better than what is already running there. The weaker the competition, the cheaper the attention and the faster you build position.
So prioritize markets and angles where you see a clear gap between what is possible and what competitors actually deliver. Go in with volume and quality before they wake up.
This is the most important phase, and it gets its own document below. In short: every market gets its own creative strategy, not a translated version of the previous one.
Every winning angle or hook from one market is fed back into the system for the next. Keep a shared library of tested concepts, and adapt the strongest ones to new markets. It shortens the learning curve every time you launch in a new country.
The first market is the most expensive one. Every market after that gets cheaper, because you already know which angles tend to work.
What converts Norwegian customers does not automatically work in a new market. Consumers in different countries have different cultural references, different price sensitivity, different trust signals and a different relationship with your product.
The rule is simple: localize, do not translate. Every market gets its own creative strategy, not a translated version of the previous one. Do not assume that what worked in Sweden works in the next market.
One thing we deliberately do the opposite of "hide the origin": we lean into the brand being Norwegian. In many markets a Scandinavian or Norwegian origin adds credibility, it signals quality, trust and a certain standard. Instead of tucking away where the brand comes from, we bring it forward as a selling point where it makes sense. It is a trust signal you already own, for free.
We separate angle from concept:
One winning angle times 12 concepts gives you 12 ads immediately. That is how we scale without guessing, and that is how we quickly fill a new market with enough variation for the algorithm to work with.
The 12 concepts we use:
More variation gives more data points, which gives lower CPM, which gives higher ROAS. With only 4 to 5 ads you paint the algorithm into a corner. It cannot match the right content to the right person if it only has one card to play.
This is one of the biggest scaling opportunities right now, and we do it daily. When an ad wins in one market, we dub it into a new language with AI. The result is hyper-realistic, the lips match, the voice sounds natural, and the creator is suddenly fluent in the target market's language. A winner from one country becomes a winner in five others, without re-shooting anything.
Why this is so powerful:
Still, remember the rule from above: dub the winner, but check that the hook, the offer and the trust signals actually fit the market sophistication level in the new market. Dubbing moves the words, not the strategy. If the message sits at the wrong sophistication level, perfect dubbing does not help.
Hard numbers from real campaigns. Everything below is published at curve.no/cases.
Swedish-founded subscription brand in DTC. The counterintuitive part: the biggest markets sit outside Scandinavia. Multiple languages, currencies and markets run simultaneously, with market-specific angles and most of the growth outside the Nordics.
Subscription DTC in pet health. UGC combined with performance advertising drove around 10x sales growth year over year, on five-figure monthly spend. A textbook example of what creative volume and proper tracking do for a subscription brand. Read the full case here.
Competed against Finn.no. Propr needed a team that could take over from a big agency and immediately improve results. 252% higher bottom line and 25% lower cost per purchase.
Creative strategy and UGC turned an underperforming golf brand into a growth case with 61% revenue growth year over year, a 59% increase in ROAS and a 44% higher conversion rate.
50% revenue growth year over year in a niche market. 22% higher spend, 22% higher ROAS on Google Ads. A system that compounds and keeps improving.
The app described as "Strava for dogs". Paid social drove meaningful user and revenue growth in a niche market. 3x+ growth in users and revenue.
Here is how we run it operationally across markets.
A large creator pool is essential when you scale internationally. You need faces and voices that actually fit each market, not one Norwegian face forced in everywhere.
That is why we have a dedicated global UGC coordinator who sources creators daily and adds them to our list of over 1000 creators. It means that when we enter a new market, we usually already have relevant creators in place, or can find them fast. Combined with AI dubbing of winners, it gives us both breadth (many faces) and speed (one winner spreads to many languages).
This is a concrete walkthrough of how we took an online store from stagnation to scaling in an international market. The case is Earthing Harmony, an online store selling grounding products in the US.
The founder, Sander, was running all Google advertising himself. It consumed a lot of time and mental energy, and the account had stagnated. On top of that, the advertising ran on standard Shopify tracking, which turned out to heavily over-attribute sales. The real numbers were far weaker than what Google reported.
It is a classic starting point: a founder doing everything himself, an account that has flatlined, and numbers that look better than they are.
The goal was to scale as far as possible while holding 3.5 ROAS on real, verified attribution. The numbers, all on real attribution, not inflated platform numbers:
That is the whole system. The rest is running it, measuring, and feeding the winners back in.
The most common reason brands stop scaling is too few ads. Without enough creative volume the algorithm runs out of signal and costs climb. We test 100+ ads per month, so the data tells us what works. An audit from us is not a generic report. We go into your account and find exactly where it is bleeding, with numbers from your own account. These are the most common leaks we find:
We are a performance agency: if we do not deliver, we do not get paid. We manage 15M+ EUR in monthly ad spend across 20+ brands, and have trained over 1000 Norwegian and Swedish marketers through live workshops.
Want to see what this looks like in practice? See our cases at /cases, including Collagen for Hund, or read how we use street interview ads and UGC to build creative volume. You will find more guides like this on the blog, and pricing on the pricing page.
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