Days to Live
Diesel Timeframes
Issue 27 | June 2013
Agency
CP+B London
Creative Team
Executive Creative Director Matt Gooden Creative Director Henrik Delehag Art Directors Martin Jon Adolfsson Philip Sinclair Writer Emma Penz Producer Rob Steiner Donny Brown Planners Wojtek Szumowski Ruth Chadwick Director Anthony Dickenson
Production Team
TV Production Company Pulse Digital Production Company Storythings Media Agencies Mindshare Media Executive Climats
Date
January 2013
Background
Diesel Timeframes aimed to challenge the relationship people had with time to encourage them to live life more bravely. The brand philosophy, ‘Time to be Brave’, encapsulated Diesel’s mission to unleash time’s potential and urged people to grab hold of the opportunities that time created.
Idea
Using an online questionnaire that calculated visitors' "days to live" (www.diesel.com/daystolive), Diesel explored how society was happy to celebrate how many years people have lived but less comfortable in recognising how much time they may have left.
Diesel could help them live every one of their remaining days to the full with an alarm clock app, that reminded them of the number of days left and provided inspiration on how to live the day more bravely.
Results
By creating a campaign that was both thought provoking and an engaging experience as well, the questionnaire has seen people using the site for on average 6-8 minutes at a time, a completion rate of over 46% and generating over 1.6m free media impressions to date - all with no paid media investment.
Our Thoughts
The Diesel calculator couldn’t work out how many days I have left to live. Maybe it didn’t want to tell me that it’s not that many.
Thirty years ago, Tony Brignull wrote one of the all-time great press ad headlines: Do this simple test to work out the date of your own death.
It was a questionnaire based on the model insurance companies use. The point of his ad for Albany Life was that life insurance had a purpose.
This idea is less serious in nature but dark in tone. Ecclesiastes put it nicely with the “eat, drink and be merry” thought. “For tomorrow we die.”