Emotional Film for Spanish Liqueur Will Make You Want to Spend More Time with Loved Ones

We are gradually getting used to a lifestyle full of surprising facts and figures where we consume more audio-visual content than ever before, have tripled mobile device usage in just six years and make most of our contacts with other people on social networks.

Without realising, we spend less and less time with our loved ones.

But, what if we stop and think about this for a moment? What if we could calculate how much time we have left to spend with the people who we care about most? How would our attitude towards life change? How would our personal relationships change? Would we really make a point of "seeing more of each other"?

This is the question posed by Ruavieja - a herbal liqueur from the north-east of Spain - through an impactful and emotive campaign that will be launched today, featuring real people. In the video, we comprehend how a simple statistic - the amount of time that we have left to spend with our loved ones- can have a great impact on members of the general public starring in the spot.

An algorithm that can change your take on life.

After watching the video we'll all want to find out what that number is. Which is why Ruavieja has created a tool capable of calculating the time we have left to spend with the people we love. It is essentially an algorithm that can raise awareness about the need to see more of each other through a simple calculation and with data based on statistical information from different sources such as the National Institute of Statistics, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), and from studies like the AEVI Videogame Industry Yearbook or Mary Meeker's 2018 Internet Trends Report for Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers (KPCB). 

The tool is hosted on an experiential website and users can answer a few questions to find out how much time they have left to spend with the person they have chosen. The questions ask how often they see each other, their age, where they live, etc.

 

This is probably the key to the campaign’s success. When you try convincing someone to spend more time with their loved ones, it’s always easy to say; the hard bit is getting them to really change their behaviour. Ruavieja wants to do just that. To wake people up to a reality that they hadn’t even realised existed, so that they can become more aware of it and begin to do something about it.

Our society lives in an endless contradiction. In the words of Rafael Santandreu, a psychologist who has collaborated in the project: "People say that their loved ones are their priority but the way they spend their time doesn’t support that statement. It’s to do with how the brain works… We are programmed to avoid thinking about how long we’ve got left to live, so we think that we will always have the chance to do the things that really make us happy."

Ruavieja’s brand proposal has been clear for quite some time now. If human bonding is the most important thing in life, then we must look after it. Kerman Romeo, brand marketing expert, says: "At Ruavieja, we firmly believe that consumers want brands to talk to them about things that really matter, not only about products. Which is why we've launched this campaign, because we're convinced that a society where people care about how they bond with others is a better place to live in.”

Leo Burnett is the agency behind the idea. The agency’s team was aware of the fact that, unfortunately, inertia pushes us to live our life on autopilot and that this doesn't necessarily make us happy. Which is why it was necessary to really shake viewers up and make them realise that, just maybe, they are not spending all the time they should be with the people they love. For Juan García-Escudero, the agency’s general creative director, "the best ideas are those capable of changing behaviours and sometimes even the way we live. If we can get people to do all they possibly can to see more of each other, we will have done something worthwhile."

Following the success of last year's Ruavieja’s campaign, expectations surrounding this commercial are high. In this respect, Juan points out that: "Christmas is a wonderful time of year where advertisers become a little bit more daring so I'm sure there’ll be excellent campaigns. Even so, we truly and humbly believe we have a good chance of making it into the top of the rankings table."

Felix Fernández de Castro was the director tasked with capturing the emotionality that the film demanded. Felix has spent more than half his professional life in advertising, first as a creative director for over a decade, writing his own stories, and later on, for an even longer period of time, shooting stories penned by others.