How do you get people to drink more of something they’re drinking less of, from a brand few people are aware of? This was the challenge facing Ruavieja: a little-known Spanish alcoholic digestive caught in a world actively turning away from slow paced tradition. 

In Spain, it is common to take a digestive liquor like Ruavieja after lunch or dinner to make the moment last longer with the people around you. However, in a constant state of rush and time perceived to be scarce, people’s time involved traditions and rituals are disappearing. 

Since it is not a widely known brand, the main objective of this campaign was to put Ruavieja on the map, by gaining relevance solving and important issue in Spanish society.

This Christmas, Ruavieja set forth a great ambition: drive greater brand awareness and relevance by credibly solving - as a digestive liquor - an important issue in Spanish society

Our first task was understanding why we manage and distribute our time the way we do.

Numerous studies prove that face to face relationships with people we care about are disappearing in favor of online interactions. Little by little control over our own time erodes away without much resistance from our side… why is that? Why don’t we place a valuation on how we spend our time?

To truly understand this, we teamed up with psychology expert Rafael Sant Andreu to understand human beings relation to and perception of time. We found that human brains are programed to avoid thinking about the time we have left to live, which is why we often postpone important things.

This is when we had our existential “aha moment.” We asked ourselves this one question: if you knew exactly how much time you have left with the people you love, would you keep on living the way you are living now? This simple yet powerful question, prompted us to figure out a way to make that prediction. To provide an answer, that would compel a behavioral change in how people valued and spent their time.

Would people change their behavior and find more time to see each other if they knew exactly how much time they had left together? We knew we had to create a bulletproof algorithm against sceptics, so we gathered data from the National Institute of Statistics on life expectancy as well as studies related with the likelihood of maintaining the frequency of our encounters over time. From this, we built a fairly accurate tool that predicted how much time you had left with someone.

To compel people to completely re-assess their perception of time, we created a film that proved our hypothesis. A film that simply captured real people’s reactions when confronted with the algorithm’s results. People who, loved each other dearly but only saw each other from time to time. The stark reality of their current behavior and valuation of time created a series of powerful portraits that transcended advertising. 

Sales increased by +52% (compared to the second best in the category +28,5%)

Carrefour had to create a direct button on its e-commerce front page due to the sudden demand.

12.1% of growth (compared to 1.3% growth of the category)

“A Brand that I’d recommend” attribute grew 22.3 percentile points from previous year. (12,6% to 34,9%)

“A brand that connects people” grows 22 percentile points from previous year. (32,1% to 54%)

Likeability of the campaign is the highest ever in the history of spirits (91%)

The most watched Spanish ad in history according to Google. (Second best is from 2009 but has only 2% organic views compared to 67% of Ruavieja’s)

The most shared Spanish ad in history according to Google. (310k compared to the second best ever 180k)

-1 Million people visited the web and more than 700K calculated how much time they had left with their loved ones.

We live in autopilot mode, devoted to work and unconsciously distributing our time in a way that’s far from ideal. On top of that, technology has invaded our lives and takes up most of the little time we have left.

In Spain, it is a common tradition to take a digestive liquor like Ruavieja after lunch or dinner to make the moment last longer. This tradition and many others are disappearing because nowadays nobody has time for anything and everyone’s always in a rush.

How we processed data: we used a very simple calculation, taking into account the current frequency with which two people see each other and their life expectancy, according to where they live. And applied the variation that statistics gave us in each case.