This project is a great example of how to bring a complicated but fundamental concept directly to the public, institutions and media: sustainable competitiveness. By placing a mysterious and shocking piece for the whole world to see and theorize about, and shortly after revealing the explanation in a way that everybody else could understand, since they were being involved from the beginning, we linked the concept to the brand’s activity, and spread awareness about an important environmental issue. We gave it for the first time a face everybody recognized and could see.

BBK is a banking foundation in the Basque Country that’s been working for years for the development of the region. BBK’s main goal is to help preservate and optimize the region’s state of welfare, and wanted to educate, sensitize and raise awareness about the importance of sustainable competitiveness and its present and future effects for our society.

BBK challenged us to impact a society that has grown comfortable and oversaturated with sustainability messages, to wake them up materializing how our daily decisions may determine how our society will ultimately look like in the near future. We created from scratch a two-phase campaign, one off-brand to generate conversation, generate awareness about how our decisions have an influence in the future and gain media attention. And the second, on-brand to showcase what could happen to us in the near future making a call to act more consciously.

By placing a giant sculpture by surprise in the middle of the main river of one of the main cities in the Basque Country, we ensured to launch a direct message to the general public, as well as environmental institutions and organizations. After everybody had time to see it, and the media had covered the story, we released the short-film that explained the environmental message behind the head, based on sustainable competitiveness, providing a recognizable face for people to associate with the idea.

Sustainable competitiveness was a complex concept that the brand wanted to transmit in order to raise awareness about how our decisions today affect our future, but keeping the positive input that we still have today the power to change the future. To transmit the message that with the actions we make today we decide if we sink or stay afloat in the future, we created a giant hyper-realistic sculpture inspired by a real girl, and installed in the middle of the river of Bilbao, designed to pop up and disappear as the tide floods and recedes and for pedestrians to see.

To make a futuristic short-film we relied on foresight, a field that generates knowledge about the future, collaborating with one of Spain’s most renowned professionals, who helped us determine a series of events that the protagonist will live in the future, and released it to the public and media.

It was a two-phase campaign: On September 22th, 2021, we surprised pedestrians with the installation of a giant living sculpture in the river ot Bizkaia, in the Basque Country. Then, on October 1st, 2021, we released a short-film starring the girl that inspired the sculpture to portray a future suffering the consequences of our unsustainable actions today.

Even though it was a regional campaign, it reached both national and international media and institutional authorities.

The campaign went viral reaching +3000 impacts in media and press, with 30% of international coverage as it was present in 75 different countries, and an audience of +200 thousand people, with an AVE of 5 million euros (+87% in KPIs).With a sentiment of 100% positive among all coverage.

The news about the project went viral on social media around the world, with more than 300 million views. Due to its huge success, the film was aired in prime-time on Basque Country’s main TV channel, eitb.

Beyond the media impact, the project allowed the BBK Foundation to engage in affairs with both national and international organizations and institutions, as they got interested in the project (AVAAZ, Basque Country’s government, Greenpeace…)