Adecco Bets on Purpose to Reframe Staffing in Spain

PS21's Strategic Insight Behind Adecco's 2019 Brand Repositioning in Spain

Adecco entered 2019 facing a structural communications challenge common to large staffing companies operating in Spain. The staffing category — dominated globally by players including Manpower Group and Randstad — had long defaulted to functional messaging: speed of placement, breadth of roles, employer network size. According to Staffing Industry Analysts, the global staffing market reached approximately US$498 billion in 2019, reflecting the scale and competitive intensity of the sector. In Spain specifically, Adecco held a leading market position, according to adeccogroup.com, yet brand differentiation remained difficult in a category where service offerings are broadly comparable across major competitors.

PS21's strategic response, led by Sergio García as strategy director, was to relocate the brand's authority from the transactional to the existential. As reported by reasonwhy.es, the agency built the campaign around the concept Daniel Sánchez Arévalo described as 'la rueda de la vida' — the wheel of life — a framework that maps human fulfilment across personal, social, and professional domains simultaneously. This insight reframes what Adecco actually provides: not a job, but a point of entry into a more purposeful life. The choice of Silvia Matos as the campaign's lead subject deepens this logic. A transgender entrepreneur conducting real recruitment interviews on camera, Matos embodies professional reinvention and social visibility in a single figure — a casting decision that signals Adecco's 2019 repositioning as inclusive by design rather than by declaration. The 'Tu Propósito' web app extended this strategic intent into an interactive personal-purpose assessment, ensuring the campaign's insight reached audiences in Spain through participation as well as spectatorship.

Daniel Sánchez Arévalo and the Craft Behind Adecco's 'Tu Propósito' Film

Daniel Sánchez Arévalo directed the campaign film for Adecco's 'Your Purpose.' A Goya Award-winning Spanish filmmaker known for narrative features, Sánchez Arévalo brought a documentary sensibility to the production that distinguishes it from conventional staffing advertising. The film's central device — placing Silvia Matos in genuine recruitment conversations with real job candidates in Spain — creates an observational tension between the performed and the real that is characteristic of his approach to character and environment, as noted by elpublicista.es.

Production company La Joya Producciones assembled a craft team whose credits reflect the film's cinematic ambitions. Sara Muñoz produced the shoot, and Álex Catalán served as director of photography, bringing a visual register to the work that supports its long-form storytelling logic. The original cut exceeded five minutes — a significant commitment for a brand film in the staffing category — before being edited to approximately three minutes for primary distribution, according to elpublicista.es. That editorial decision reflects a deliberate choice to honour the material's narrative weight rather than compress it to a conventional advertising duration.

The creative team at PS21 — Marcos Martínez and Rubén Sánchez — framed the film around the 'wheel of life' concept that Sánchez Arévalo subsequently interpreted through his directorial approach. The integration of the 'Tu Propósito' web app as a companion experience extended the film's narrative architecture into an interactive format, allowing audiences across Spain to map their own personal, social, and professional purpose using the same conceptual framework that structures the film. Agency contact Beatriz Arce coordinated production across PS21 and La Joya Producciones, while Adsmurai managed the campaign's media placement in the Spanish digital environment.