Calculator Predicting Time Left With Loved Ones Goes Viral

Leo Burnett Madrid’s Christmas offering for the Spanish drinks brand Ruavieja caught the country's attention this week with a spooky calculator that predicts how much time we have left to spend with friends and family.

Named Tenemos Que Vernos Mas (which translates as: We Have To See Each Other More), the campaign drives home the fact that, as we spend increasing amounts of time consuming audio-visual content, socialising digitally and generally gawping at screens, the less quality time we are devoting to actually hanging with our nearest and dearest.

Directed by Felix Fernandez de Castro, through Tesauro, the moving film has garnered more than 6.6 million views on YouTube and been covered by every major news outlet in the country. It features real pairings of friends and relations who discover how many days and hours they have left to spend together via the calculating tool at tenemosquevernosmas.com 

It's heartening to watch old chums, such as Juan Pedro and Juan Luis (below), meet up and explain how they struggle to find time together, though they realise how much they mean to each other. 

It's then actually quite appalling when the calculator reveals the "exact" amount of time they will get to see each other over the rest of their (predicted) lifespans...

As a piece of science, it's not exactly precise, the prediction generator asks questions such as how often the subjects meet up, their age, where they live etc and then blends it with data based on statistical information from different sources, such as the National Institute of Statistics, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), and from studies like the AEVI Videogame Industry Yearbook or Mary Meeker's 2018 Internet Trends Report for KPCB. 

But as a prompt to raise awareness about the need to prioritise quality time over Face Time and wasted time, it's having a profound effect; as testified by reactions on Twitter at #TenemosQueVernosMás

Rafael Santandreu, a psychologist who has collaborated on the project, explains that our brains are programmed to avoid thinking about how long we have left before we die, thus we always think there is plenty of time to do the important things – such as share quality experiences with chums and family – later on, when we're not so busy.  

"People say that their loved ones are their priority but the way they spend their time doesn’t support that statement."

All the people featured on the film were alarmed by how little time they had left to share with loved ones, all had been expecting years not days... So pay attention to Ruavieja’s brand mission – to emphasis the importance of human bonding, which is best done the old analogue way, over a shared tipple…