Atresmedia and conceptual advertising – beyond selling products and creating an event.

With an abundance of exotic travel destinations around the globe, it is challenging for the tourism industry of any country to stand out among the crowd and convince new vacationers to travel to their little side of paradise.

This week’s egtabite showcases a creative approach to this challenge from the Spanish sales house Atresmedia, which took the idea of a tourism campaign to a new level and gave a brand-new meaning to the concept of paradise.

This Side of Paradise

To promote the Canary Islands as the go-to-place for relaxing holidays, the Special Solutions and Sales Department of Atresmedia - together with the creative agency IPG Mediabrand Spain - developed a special format for their client, the Canary Islands Tourism Office, building on the concept of paradise.

The main idea behind this creative format was to associate the concept of paradise with the Canary Islands. To accomplish the connection, Atresmedia developed one-minute TV spots promoting travels to the Islands – which needed to be shown at the right time and in the right context. What better time for an ad break promoting relaxation and vacation than amid heated political debates on national television?

The ideal moment to launch this TV campaign proved to be the political debates around the European Parliament elections, shown on all Atresmedia TV channels and radio stations. The idea was to suddenly interrupt the show at the moment a debate hits its peak, transporting the viewers from a ‘bad atmosphere’ to a relaxing one.

The word climate plays an important role in this conceptual advertising campaign. Bad climate in Spanish is a well-thought play on words with a dual meaning, referring to both the bad weather in general, but mainly to the bad atmosphere, anger, misunderstanding in the studio, due to the opposing political views.

For example, while participants were arguing, a bad climate detector in the studio would beep and the TV host would immediately invite all the guests to calm down, take a deep breath, change the current climate (mood), reset the good atmosphere and travel to the Canary Islands, even just for one, meaningful minute. A seamless transition to the breath-taking landscape of a Spanish tourist gem would follow.

The first one-minute spot in the ad break was not merely enticing audiences to book their plane tickets and visit the Canary Islands. The short clip also made viewers stop for a minute and think what an actual paradise may look like – it is not simply travelling to an exotic destination, but having a paradise in your mind, with more positive energy, serenity, empathy, understanding and humanity. After one minute, the studio climate detector indicated the ambience was recharged with positive energy and the discussion in the studio would continue.

The second phase of this conceptual TV campaign took place during the New Year’s Eve celebrations. Usually, broadcast TV does not consider the different time zones in Spain, with the Canary Islands being one hour behind of the mainland.

Atresmedia saw this campaign as the perfect opportunity to change this and include the Canary Islands in the New Year’s TV show. This required celebrating the start of the New Year and the eating of traditional grapes at midnight twice: once for mainland Spain and once, an hour later again, for the Canary Islands.

The same key messages were used as in the first phase of the campaign: let’s enjoy one more hour of good mood, positive energy and good weather by talking about the Canary Islands.

To emphasise the dual approach, Atresmedia included an influencer, the most famous host of the New Year’s Eve show, Christina Pedroche. Every year, her outfits are a topic of conversation in Spain for more months to come. Therefore, due to this special occasion of celebrating two countdowns to midnight, Atresmedia asked Christina to wear not one, but two elaborate dresses. Moreover, the influencer and hostess wore a design inspired by the concept of paradise and the Canary Islands It proved to be the most successful dress model that she presented so far. Her dress was a trending topic in the following year, adding to the success of the campaign.

The double midnight celebration was significant in another way, as it was the moment when both the Presidents of the community of Madrid and the Canary Islands Communities had planned an appearance together in the context of the elections – as they are from the same political party.

As the campaign had a huge impact on the regular broadcasts, every aspect required clearance from the channels and close collaboration with the TV and radio hosts.

Future initiatives

The conceptual advertising campaign took a substantial preparation time and was conceived specifically to build a long-term relationship with the Canary Islands Tourism Office. However, due to its great popularity in the market, with a mix of trademark political and social events, influencer involvement and emotional appeal to the targeted audience, a similar format might be repeated in the future.