Real Life Mum Celebrated in Co-op Docu-Spot

How are you spending Mother’s day this Sunday?

Armed with this simple question, Forever Beta approached London’s pedestrians to find out what they’ve got planned for their mums ahead of the weekend - and in turn, created an emotional and heart-warming spot for Co-op.

While most people revealed that they would be cooking their mothers a slap-up meal or treating her to a spa session, Emma’s story stood out. She wanted to convert the family’s old home movies onto digital and present them to her mum June.

Forever Beta decided to document the process and create a 90-second film, following Emma planning the surprise and eventually holding a family screening of the films, which hadn't been seen for ages.

The docu-style spot was a perfect fit for Co-op as it reminded customers that all sorts of presents can be purchased at the store, but encouraged them to get personal for a Mother’s day to remember.

Forever Beta’s ECD Matt Saunby reveals that a little luck went a long way, as he shares the production process behind creating the ad.

What was the brief on this project? 

It’s that time of year again when all the retailers put Mother’s Day gifts on display. In light of this, our challenge was clear, we had to create a campaign to make Co-op Mother’s Day 2017 more personal, more emotional and feel less commercial. We wanted to inspire people to think a bit more about their mums.

Why did you decide that a vox pop was the best way to approach this campaign? 

Co-op champion real people in the community, from local good causes to British farmers. So when it came to producing the Co-op Mother’s Day film we didn’t just want to make up a story and write a fictitious script. We wanted to find a real story, with real emotion, featuring real people. Vox pops were a good way of finding our real story. Though we knew we also needed a bit of luck.

How long did it take to find this particular story and why did you know that it would work? 

Emma, the star of our film, was one of the vox pops we filmed over a couple of days. When we asked her how she was going to make her Mother’s day special she mentioned chocolates, flowers, that sort of thing. But then she thought for a minute and told us about the old home movies she wanted to convert to digital. It sounded like film gold. Old cine footage looks amazing and we knew that if we could observe the story then we’d have a really engaging film that emotionally connected with our audience. As the camera rolled so did the tears.

And what were the biggest obstacles that you had to overcome in realising the spot? 

A real, documentary style film always presents challenges. We obviously wanted the final film to be as beautiful as possible but we didn’t want to interfere with Emma’s story. So we set the scene but then we just had to let it play out naturally. We wanted the real emotion to come through. Luckily for us, our Co-op clients are brave and have a creative vision that allows for this style of unscripted film-making. 

Another big challenge we had was time and budget. We had very little of both. But we made it work and the story shone through.

Most mother’s day spots are emotional yet with a meaningful message. Why do you think this tried-and-tested format works so well?

Mum’s are special. They do so much for us, often without any thanks. So any time you remind people of the sacrifices mum’s make and give them an opportunity to say thanks it’s going to have an emotional outcome. In our case we wanted to inspire people to think a bit more about their mum and do something special this year - we wanted everyone to make their Mother’s day.