Ad of the Day | Equinor Launches STEMgapet Campaign to Inspire the Next Generation of Scientists and Engineers

Oct. 13, 2026

Somewhere between childhood and the moment you choose what to study, a lot of curiosity goes missing. Equinor calls it the STEM gap, and its new film opens there, with the question every teenager learns to dread: "Hva skal du bli?" — what are you going to be? The storyline then brings us back to the foundational childhood moments that define who we are.

What follows is a portrait of a series of small investigations, moments of reckless bravery that were catalysts for something much bigger. A tractor sits in a farmyard, its windscreen cracked, and two young boys working to set it back to work again. A young girl soldering iron close to a circuit board and frowns. The questions come one at a time, in the voice of a child working something out: What is it for? How does it work? What if I do this? What's the worst that could happen? Each one of these moments is the start of scientific method, though none of these children would call it that.

The film's most striking images come where the past meets the present. In a wood-panelled bedroom, a boy films his younger sister with a camcorder wired to an old CRT television, and the screen tracks her hand in glowing cyan points. Later the same instinct shows up at full scale: a cyclist in a wind tunnel simulation while an engineer traces the airflow around his helmet with a wand of smoke. The cut makes the campaign's argument without stating it. The engineer is the child with the camcorder, and while the questions didn’t change, the equipment only got better.

Then the film names the premise: "Your curiosity. Maybe the finest thing you have” an encouragement to not grow out of.

De Thurah and DOP Daniel Voldheim shoot all of it in low, overcast Nordic light, with deep blues, greens and the warm glow of the sun. The film is tactile and patient, and it trusts small gestures to carry the emotion that all the curiosity inside of us needs a place to manifest. That somewhere being STEMgapet.no. The film doesn’t lecture on recruitment figures or skills shortages, nor does it present the brand as the answer. Instead, with a well-researched and diverse perspective, it reminds a generation of something they already know about themselves, pointing curiosity towards the fields that need it most.