Love like there’s no tomorrow
Mondelez International
Issue 40 | September 2016
Agency
OgilvyOne Athens
Creative Team
Executive Creative Director: Panos Sambrakos Creative Director: Franceska Galafti Art Director: Gert Tzafa Copywriter: George Theodorakopoulos
Production Team
Music: Vaggelis Tountas Editor: Lambis Charalampidis Screenwriter: Myrto Kontova Film Director: Christos Nikoleris Line Producer: Veta Chatziioannou Film Producer: Stelios Cotionis
Other Credits
Creative Technologist: Manolis Mavrikakis Programmers: George Alatzas, Akis Makris Account Directors: Christina Alifakioti, Annita Galanopoulou Account Managers: Nikolas Tsakonas, Nikos Kalozymis
Date
February 2016
Background
In Greece, Lacta chocolate is associated with love and romance. But the country’s economic travails meant Greeks had fallen out of love with love, prioritising instead financial survival and getting by day to day.
To make things worse, Lacta’s target audience had become increasingly immune to Lacta’s romantic messages.
Idea
Working with OgilvyOne, Mondelez brand Lacta wanted to remind Greeks of the importance of loving ‘like there’s no tomorrow’ in the run-up to Valentine’s Day.
A two-part film was released on Facebook. In the first 43-minute film, a widower in his 40s, who has recently lost his wife in an accident, yearns for his old life with her.
Magically time shifts back just before her accident, when he receives a mystery phone call in which he is given 24 hours to change the course of events and love her ‘like there’s no tomorrow’.
To stop the clock running down, viewers were invited to answer a question: if you had 24 hours, to whom would you say ‘I love you’?
After submitting their choice and phone number online, the 24-hour countdown ticked away on their screens. Part two of the film continued – with a happy ending.
As the film ended, the viewers received a mystery call reminding them that time was running out for them to keep their promise.
Results
The film achieved 2 million unique views and 290,000 declarations of love were made.
Lacta’s Facebook post generated 250,000 likes, comments and shares, with many saying it made them re-evaluate their priorities. The film became YouTube’s top-trending film in Greece in January.
Broadcast on national television on the eve of Valentine’s Day, the film achieved a 25 per cent share.
Our Thoughts
You can see why the origins of the word ‘melodrama’ are partly Greek. This is obviously a nation that laps up over-the-top drama, and the fact that it’s linked to flogging chocolate has little bearing on their appetite for it.
Etymology and the ‘homage’ to the film Sliding Doors apart though, there’s some clever thinking in here, allied to execution.
The thinking bit is understanding how a gruelling economic and political crisis impacts behaviour: survival becomes everything, and the stuff that makes us human – ie love – is forgotten or put to one side. In this situation, chocolate can become the vehicle through which we rediscover how to express our feelings for each other.
But finding a novel and engaging way to bring that alive is hard, the complex mechanic of the storyline deserves praise, not to mention the technical wizardry involved in calibrating the screen clocks of individual respondents to the promotion.