Beyond celebrating the best and most innovative work our industry has to offer, the Tomorrow Awards set up to let everybody know and understand the how behind every winning and shortlisted campaign.

After chatting with Ogilvy Brasil’s Eduardo Marques yesterday, we talk a short walk down the corridor to meet his colleague, Creative Director Rubens Filho to chat about another idea that lit up the viral charts and generated an unprecedented amount of  blog posts, shares, likes, tweets and retweets when its video went online : $73,000 Bar Tab

Tomorrow: How would you classify this?  Clearly it was a stunt but its biggest impact seems to have been online…

Rubens: I think it’s more than a stunt because it ended up playing bigger. You do it in one place, and it worked one way, and then you put it on the internet and it ends up being bigger.

In the bar it was all about making people think about not taking their keys and drive. The timing was perfect, because it was just before they left the bar, and in some cases they were very drunk so they go astonished by those numbers. We probably wouldn’t have gotten the same reactions if they were sober (laughs). When you take it online, you’re making people think about drinking and driving differently. They discuss the issue and it’s more educational in a way.

So that’s what was interesting here. It works both ways.

Tomorrow: How did you approach the client with an idea like this?

Rubens: Brazil had hardened its laws towards drunk driving, so bars had to do something. It wasn’t easy, because bars are so connected to their clients, so how are they going to approach drink and driving there?

So we showed them that it was important to talk about it in the very place people drink, and even tough they didn’t feel that comfortable in the beginning they ended up buying the idea and going for it in the end. It was a challenge, but that’s also part of the game.

Tomorrow: Did the bar end up getting more customers as a result of the campaign?

Rubens: It’s very hard to measure these things, but this chain of bars is usually very busy and popular. But people discussing it from a different perspective, talking about the bold action they did brought them to the map. A different map (laughs). But we don’t really have the numbers behind that.

Tomorrow: Do you think there is a way to build on this idea to bring more awareness to the cause?

Rubens: We did think of making it bigger. Beside taking to the internet and have people discuss the issues, the other idea we had was taking it to other associations to get more bars involved.

The chain of bars were our clients, but for that we’d have to find another client and that stopped making sense fast. We tried to make it as big as possible with what we had. Of course it would’ve been lovely if every bar in Brazil launched this on the same day, that was the dream, but it was impossible. But just having the digital tools to make it reach a broader audience was special in itself. We couldn’t have done that five years ago.