Me and my other Me uses data analysis to reveal the "true self" of a number of individuals according to their behaviour online, then creates an avatar that bring the data to life and puts face to face both versions of the same person to reveal their true self.

In Spain, the brand is available in every bar, yet Spanish consumers have no clue what Ballantine’s stands for. Maybe this explains why Ballantine’s market share lags behind the leading whisky brand in Spain, J&B.

In 2015 Ballantine’s introduced a new global brand platform: Stay True. However, the concept had had little impact for the brand in Spain.

In 2020, Pernod Ricard felt there was an opportunity for Ballantine’s to speak up and connect with Spanish audiences in a meaningful way, driving brand preference and, hopefully, trigger sales in the all-important Holiday season, when 30% of yearly sales happen.

The brief was straightforward: how can Ballantine’s make the Stay True idea relevant to consumers in Spain and get them to drink the brand more often?

“Me and my other Me” is a study that shows the lack of authenticity in all of us by confronting the incoherence between the social self and the private self.

To bring this study to life, we developed a bespoke original methodology that combines techniques of clinical psychology with data analysis.

The analysis of different online platforms -Google, Facebook, Spotify, etc.- was key to find out how people behave in their devices, when nobody is watching.

The participants underwent psychological testing in order to identify the profiles with the highest social desirability, a trait that defines the likelihood of human beings to do whatever it takes to please others.

Finally, we represented the “other me” as avatars in the shape of realistic holograms sitting by the participants. The contrast between the person the data shows and what the individuals say was dramatic.

Fran: I don't consider myself a vain person,

Avatar: I have searched myself online 954 times.

To build the study, the participants were asked to download their user history from different online services such as Google, WhatsApp, LinkedIn or Facebook. This is something that the new GDPR facilitates.

The resulting data were then fed into an advanced analytics solution that turns the raw data into compelling and useful insights through AI and natural language processing. With that, we automatically started to see patterns using natural language processing for imagery, and AI machine learning techniques to make predictive models and thus understand who these individuals actually were.

The insights extracted from data analysis were then transformed into questions for a personal interview with the participants. For each question we confronted the prompted answer of the participant with the answer provided by the data.

Laura: … I don’t buy much.

Avatar: In the last month I made 1,345 searches on e-commerce pages.

The data analysis work revealed the true self of each of the participants according to their behavior online.

This stack of information allowed us to create the “other self”, individual avatars for each of the participants created from both their public and private behaviors online.

A number of personal questions were then developed by lead psychologist Dr Juan Ramos-Cejudo, and the avatars were asked to “answer” them according to the stories the data revealed.

Finally, avatars in the shape of holograms were created. The holograms would then appear during the live interview between the psychologist and each of the participants, providing answers to every question according to their behavior online.

The release of the study made Ballantine’s “Stay True” idea relevant to Spanish audiences as it triggered a large number of conversations on social media, particularly on Twitter, where the engagement rate grew +212% vs the previous year.

However its profound cultural relevance and impact are revealed by the 260,000+ times it was shared on WhatsApp, the most popular and intimate social network in Spain, and the +9 million views in the first 48h upon release.

Upon its release, the share of conversation of Ballantine’s across social media in Spain skyrocketed to 91.3% vs 8.7% for J&B. And more importantly, Ballantine’s became the number 1 whisky brand in market share in the Spanish market for the first time ever… despite having a media investment -56% lower than J&B.

On a final note, the study is being replicated in representative samples in order to be evaluated as a potential diagnostic tool.