A Slice of School Life Warms Hearts for Robinsons

With their new “Real Love In Every Drop” platform, developed with agency Lucky Generals, soft drink brand Robinsons become the latest British brand to try their hand at heartwarming, slice of life style advertising: vignettes of everyday life with the product as a catalyst for very human emotional moments.

Slice of life ads have a big potential advantage. They’re a great opportunity to show what Orlando Wood calls “between-ness”, moments of human connection and communication. Betweenness matters because it gets the attention of our right-brain, which notices context and relationships. Right-brain attention, as Orlando’s books Lemon and Look Out show, goes hand in hand with greater brand-building effectiveness.

So a slice of life ad, with its strong focus on small human moments, is the perfect vehicle for between-ness. It also tends to involve other elements that get the right brain interested, like dialogue, storytelling, and meaningful gestures and glances.

All those elements are present and correct in this first Robinson entry for its new campaign. Robinsons is a classic example of a brand that’s typically bought by parents and drunk by (or with) kids, so Lucky Generals and Robinsons are zooming in on vital moments of parent and child bonding, like when a Mum comes to pick her kid up from school.

Not all those moments are entirely happy ones! Every parent will know the feeling of answering a call from school to hear that their child has got into a scrape, or in this case is up to some mischief. Cleverly, the ad never shows us what the naughty child has done – the mother is irritated, and her son is crestfallen, but the misdemeanour isn’t important. The point is the two of them making up, around the kitchen table with a glass of Robinsons. An attempt at a stern silence turns to a smile, and then laughter, and the boy knows that even if he’s not quite heard the last of it, things are going to be OK.

It’s a really sweet, charming ad, helped enormously by how well the boy actor communicates his guilt, worry and then relief. The ad doesn’t use any music, letting the dialogue speak for itself. It’s a bold decision as the whole emotional turning point of the ad is the silence between mother and child, made more powerful by the lack of a soundtrack. On the Test Your Ad emotional Trace we see plenty of sadness and fear which resolve quickly into happiness when the laughter begins.

So how does Robinsons’ slice of life resonate with real viewers? Extremely well. “Real Love In Every Drop” scores 4.7-Stars on the Test Your Ad platform, much higher than the 3.1-Star water and soft drinks average. That’s a really strong predictor of long-term brand building potential, but the ad also excels on short-term Spike Rating and on Brand Fluency, with Exceptional ratings in both areas.

In an ad environment full of fast-paced special effects and AI blurring the lines between the real and the fantastic, ads like Robinsons prove that you can often make the most impact with great acting, excellent craft and a solid human story.