Put down your phone and go see your mom.
“Man, what we really need is a statistician.” Said no ad agency. Ever.
Or so you’d think.
Good ad campaigns are funny. Or tear-jerkers. Or own it with just one line. But the great ones are …. smart.
Smart like, it takes a nerd. Smart like, let’s crunch some numbers.
Smart like … the 2018 holiday campaign by Spanish Liqueur company Ruavieja.
“We have to see more of each other” puts a poignant pin on a problem we all have, but won’t admit. Many of us spend more time with our technology and its self-centered social media cousins than we do face-to-face with the people we say matter the most. –
Chosen as the top holiday ad by AdWeek and Everyone Who’s Anyone in Advertising, the campaign includes a moving video where real people reunite with their best friend, mom, sister, etc., and are asked the innocent question – “Would you like to know much time you have left together?” Of course they would! We don’t see the answer ourselves (initially), but we see their tearful reactions.
Surely, that can’t be right, they say.
And then we see, for each pair, how many days and hours are left for them to be together. A simple calculation based on their locations, life expectancies, and how often and long they see the other person.
It is a literal, factual smackdown of any thought that you have all the time in the world to spend with those you love.
You don’t.
And you ought to be paying closer attention to what you ARE doing with your time. The video ends by tossing out a few real-life stats on how we’re really spending our lives. Over the next 40 years, we will spend …. hundreds of days streaming. YEARS watching TV and staring at screens. And yet, in our lifetime, just days – sometimes not even in double digits – with the people we say make living worthwhile.
The Leo Burnett agency says stats for the concept come from various sources including the National Institute of Statistics, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), and from studies like the AEVI Videogame Industry Yearbook and Mary Meeker’s 2018 Internet Trends Report for Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers (KPCB).
That’s right. It takes a left brain and a right brain to concoct an ad that makes you get your head on straight.
As Juan García-Escudero, Leo Burnett Madrid creative director, put it,
The best ideas are those capable of changing behaviors and sometimes even the way we live.”
It’s a great testimony to why ad agencies need nerds, and how data can make messaging compelling and relevant. Excellent message, wonderful execution. Try it yourself. And then … go see your mom. Or your sister. Or your best friend…..