ARCHIVEFAD Bets on Truth to Reframe How Spain Sees Its Youth
FAD's 'The Real Young' is a 2019 public interest campaign created by Saatchi & Saatchi in Spain that challenges prevailing negative stereotypes about young people aged 15 to 29, using a fully digital content strategy built around social video, display advertising, Instagram Stories, and radio to reframe public perception of Spanish youth.
FAD — Fundación FAD Juventud — launched the campaign in January 2019, with public announcement following on February 27, 2019, as documented on the Fundación FAD Juventud campaign page. The initiative marked a deliberate strategic break from the foundation's earlier identity as a traditional anti-drug advertiser. According to fad.es, 'The Real Young' was FAD's first campaign directed entirely at young people through digital channels, signalling a broader institutional repositioning away from drug-use prevention messaging toward a youth-development and social-wellbeing mission. The campaign remained active across Spain from January through approximately April 2019, a period of roughly four months.
The campaign's creative suite was expansive for a public service initiative. Saatchi & Saatchi produced a 120-second launch film, a 60-second 'Ironies' film, five 15-second typographic videos, eight-second attention pieces, and a dedicated set of Instagram Stories executions, per fad.es. This multi-format architecture allowed the campaign to serve different attention spans and platform behaviours across the Spanish digital landscape, while maintaining a unified strategic idea: that the dominant cultural narrative about young people in Spain is inaccurate and unfair. The Clapboard Score for this campaign is 63 out of 100, reflecting a structurally ambitious public interest effort whose reach is substantiated but whose creative distinction remains moderately documented in the public record.
FAD entered 2019 with a fundamentally different strategic premise than most Spanish public interest advertisers. Rather than targeting harmful behaviour directly, the campaign sought to correct the perception of young people as a social problem rather than a social asset. According to fad.es, 'The Real Young' was designed to challenge stereotypes and reframe how Spain's broader population — and young people themselves — understand contemporary Spanish youth between the ages of 15 and 29.
This repositioning was not made in a vacuum. Spain's institutional advertising environment in 2018 and 2019 was active and competitive. According to Transparencia Gob, Spain's central government conducted 66 institutional campaigns in 2018 and contracted 60 in 2019. Within that environment, public interest organisations like FAD competed for youth attention against well-resourced government communication initiatives. The positive-framing strategy Saatchi & Saatchi chose distinguished FAD from campaigns relying on fear appeals or problem-forward messaging — an approach FAD itself had used in earlier decades, including the 1990s shock-tactic executions documented by canamo.net, which featured confrontational anti-drug imagery such as worm-and-cocaine visuals.
The shift also responded to a well-established insight in public health communication: negative stereotyping of young audiences can reduce engagement and reinforce disengagement rather than motivate behaviour change. By treating young Spaniards as protagonists rather than problems, 'The Real Young' pursued a model closer to social documentary than traditional public service advertising. Adsoftheworld.com notes the campaign's digital-first architecture as defining for FAD's 2019 output. In Spain, where youth-focused digital consumption was already driving platform investment from competitors in the social media and streaming space, a multi-format digital rollout was both strategically appropriate and logistically necessary to reach the 15-to-29 demographic at meaningful scale.
Saatchi & Saatchi Barcelona led the full creative development of 'The Real Young' under Executive Creative Director Óscar Martínez. The creative team included Creative Director Miriam Gutiérrez, Creative Supervisor Nani Albéniz, Art Director Michel Morem, and Copywriters Mikel San Juan and Santiago Arcusa, with account responsibilities held by Lara Díez, Luís Gago Morillo, Silvia Martínez, Begoña Budía, and María Ramos, as documented by adsoftheworld.com. Production was handled by The Gang and Prodigious.
The creative approach treats young Spaniards as documentary subjects rather than advertising targets. The 120-second launch film anchors the campaign with an observational, character-led register that invites audiences to recognise real young people rather than media constructions of youth. The companion 60-second 'Ironies' film uses ironic juxtaposition to expose the gap between how young people are perceived and how they actually live — a technique that sharpens the campaign's central argument without resorting to didacticism.
The supporting suite of five 15-second typographic videos demonstrates formal restraint. Typography-led short-form content was a deliberate choice for social platform environments where text-forward video performs without sound — a practical consideration that also carries aesthetic weight, lending the campaign a visual identity distinct from the illustrative or photographic conventions common in Spanish public interest advertising of the period. The eight-second attention pieces and Instagram Stories executions extended this identity into the most compressed formats available in 2019, showing a production logic designed for consumption across multiple contexts rather than a single flagship placement. The crafted coherence across formats — from two-minute film to eight-second clip — represents one of the more structurally ambitious executions in FAD's documented campaign history, per fad.es.
ARCHIVENo independently audited third-party performance data for 'The Real Young' is publicly available beyond what FAD itself has documented. According to fad.es, the campaign reached more than 4 million young people during its first four months of activity across Spain. FAD's 2019 activity report, also published by fad.es, recorded 2,187,379 video views and 5,321,200 advertising impressions for the campaign. A separate figure cited by adsoftheworld.com places video views at more than 1.8 million during the same four-month window, a number consistent with the trajectory recorded in the activity report.
These figures, drawn from the client's own institutional reporting, indicate meaningful distribution for a Spanish public interest campaign operating without a commercial media budget of the scale available to government institutional advertisers. The reach figure of more than 4 million against a target audience of 15-to-29-year-olds in Spain reflects efficient digital deployment across the multi-format suite Saatchi & Saatchi produced.
Structurally, the campaign's effectiveness rests on its format diversity. A single flagship film rarely sustains reach across compressed digital attention environments; the presence of eight-second and 15-second assets alongside the primary films suggests a media strategy built for sustained frequency rather than a single broadcast moment. Whether 'The Real Young' produced measurable shifts in attitude toward young people in Spain remains undocumented in the public record. The Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100 reflects a campaign that demonstrates strategic clarity and production ambition, while leaving broader impact claims unverified by independent sources.
'The Real Young' is a 2019 public interest campaign by FAD and Saatchi & Saatchi in Spain. It challenges negative stereotypes about young people aged 15 to 29, using a fully digital multi-format strategy across social video, display, Instagram Stories, and radio to reframe how Spanish society perceives its youth generation.
FAD launched 'The Real Young' in January 2019. The campaign was publicly announced on February 27, 2019, per fad.es, and remained active through approximately April 2019. It was FAD's first campaign directed entirely through digital channels, representing a strategic shift from the foundation's earlier traditional public service advertising formats.
Saatchi & Saatchi Barcelona created 'The Real Young' for FAD. Executive Creative Director Óscar Martínez led the team, which included Creative Director Miriam Gutiérrez and Copywriters Mikel San Juan and Santiago Arcusa. Production was handled by The Gang and Prodigious, as documented by adsoftheworld.com.
According to fad.es, 'The Real Young' reached more than 4 million young people in Spain during its first four months. FAD's 2019 activity report recorded 2,187,379 video views and 5,321,200 advertising impressions, making it one of the foundation's most widely distributed digital campaigns to that point in its history.
'The Real Young' was FAD's first fully digital campaign, per fad.es, marking a break from earlier anti-drug shock-tactic advertising documented by canamo.net. Rather than targeting harmful behaviour, it repositioned FAD around positive youth identity, treating young Spaniards as protagonists rather than a social problem requiring correction or deterrence.
'The Real Young' by FAD received a Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100. The score reflects the campaign's strategic clarity and multi-format production ambition across Spain's digital landscape, balanced against the absence of independently verified impact data measuring attitude change among the 15-to-29-year-old target audience.
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