The best Asturias proudly claims

The campaign of LA NUEVA ESPAÑA and the company HONOR culminates in a collective recognition of the region as an “attractive and hospitable” place, capable of competing and “showing itself to the world” | The mural that finished off the project was donated to the Vinjoy Foundation

“Well of course”. Back to where it all began, to the “shocking” question that one day last spring was written on the facade of the headquarters of LA NUEVA ESPAÑA in Oviedo, the campaign “Pride is written with H“ was closed yesterday with the two words that summarize the answer. Is it an honor to be Asturian? “Well of course”. The Vice President of the Principality, Juan Cofino, closed the closing ceremony of the initiative, promoted by the technology company HONOR and Prensa Ibérica, the publishing group of this newspaper, thanking the unconventional use of an advertising action to “make the good Asturias visible” and the effort to collaborate in the task group to “clear topics”. “They are sticky, difficult, recurring” and it is convenient to combat them, he added, confronting them with reality, with facts and people, with testimonies such as those of the twelve successful Asturians who have lent their experience to an initiative that in the end, in reality , was going to “rediscover us”.

Journalist Pachi Poncelahost of the closing ceremony at the Asturian Press Club of LA NUEVA ESPAÑA, summarized in these terms the path that a campaign in three phases has traveled in four months that has culminated in the live production, on the front of the newspaper, of the auction unusual of a mural that collects everything from the hand of the urban artist Cesar Frey, “The seventh kid”, and that will be donated to the Vinjoy Foundation. The exaltation of one’s own, the “happy idea” of “undoing misunderstandings in relation to this land” that Cofiño highlights, yesterday led to a testimony of collective recognition of the powers of the region and, above all, of the need to disclose them and make them visible.

The process of searching and rescuing the best of Asturias is enough for a collective conclusion of the participants, of the twelve interviewed in the process of dismantling the clichés, that they see the region as “a magnificent, hospitable and attractive place to develop a project of life”, a place with the potential to compete with any other. Very needy and capable “of teaching the rest of the world,” Juan Cofiño also said, “that very important things are done here.”

The “hook” of the campaign was therefore Asturias, “the good Asturias”. Ultimately, it is an image campaign for the region as well as for the company. In form, its development materializes Prensa Ibérica’s awareness that “the communication needs of brands have evolved”. The CEO of the group, Aitor Moll, speaks of the need to “go through different channels, both digital and physical”, of the design of this “transmedia campaign” and of the “commitment to new forms of communication in an unprecedented process of cooperation with the brand in which we have sought innovation and excellence”. The result has been an “ambitious” project, “unprecedented in Spain”, followed by Angeles Riverodeputy director general of LA NUEVA ESPAÑA, reviewing the months of “intense work, with emotion and heart”, which have crystallized in a process whose result is attested by the “close to seventy million impacts in terms of reach thanks to multimedia publications in the media and social networks.

With the “common thread” of “bringing out the feeling of belonging that we all should have with our place of origin”, and from that question from the façade of whether it is a pride to be Asturian, the attempt branched off in several directions. In three phases. In the first, it was about “dismantling with the help of our readers a series of capital topics with a small or null base” and the launching of questions through social networks, and reports in the digital and printed editions of the newspaper, had ” more than six million hits on networks and more than 25,000 interactions in just four weeks,” said Rivero. The process of dismantling the topic then interviewed twelve Asturians, referents in their areas, and culminated in the public preparation, for eighteen days, of the mural in which Frey made with the image of the twelve interviewees and a collage of references to pride of asturianía a great mural of nine meters by 3.40. All spread throughout Spain through the group’s media, “it has been a magnificent and priceless promotional campaign for Asturias through the headers of Prensa Ibérica”.

Behind was HONOR, a young company, which has only been in Spain since May 2021 and which, in addition to selling the qualities of its technological product, also wanted to “give the brand a soul, hook the market from an emotional point of view”. In the voice of your marketing director, Ramiro Larragan, after wondering “why don’t we start with Asturias?” they set out to “generate a positivity and emotional relationship between the people of Asturias and the brand”.

The visibility that the project has acquired could attest to the many who saw César Frey paint from Monday to Sunday, with the biggest heat wave in memory and one day in the rain, on the facade of the headquarters of LA NUEVA ESPAÑA . “I enjoyed it a lot,” the artist acknowledged yesterday, delighted to remember the close contact he had with the public while he resolved the adaptation of the bodies of those portrayed to the dimensions of the mural or painted around them a hórreo, a Don Pelayo, a bottle of cider, a formula 1 or a bear. He did not count the hours of work or the spray cans, but he did confess that nothing is improvised in the artistic, that improvisation only “flows when you are relaxed and you see that the work is assembled.”

One of those days, “The Seventh Kid” heard a voice behind him that said “what the graffiti was and what it ended up being…” Turning around, he saw a woman around seventy years old who one day was a girl who painted in the Bronx and with whom she established a solid friendship. “Now I talk to her every day, she has invited me to paint in Brooklyn” and on the mural there is an angel in three dimensions in memory of a story that she told him, that of the children killed by graffiti, those who died against a electrified fence or next to the train tracks on the outskirts of New York as a result of the decision of a mayor in the eighties who prohibited painting in the subway and wanted to protect the tracks from graffiti artists. Back in the present, capping off an ad campaign with the work of a street artist “is smart,” she says. “It’s in line with what’s happening in the rest of the world, where the big galleries and auction houses are betting on street art.”

His mural for the campaign of HONOR and LA NUEVA ESPAÑA will end up on a wall, necessarily large, of the Vinjoy Foundation, the socio-educational organization that cares for people who need supportive care and belong to groups that are often made invisible and suffer situations of abuse, violence juvenile, deafness… Its managing director, Adolf Rivas, thanked the donation and the initiative “which speaks to us of the empowerment of our land”, he said, “of not thinking about the depression that the past entails or the anxiety that justifies the future, but about the people who work in the present” . With its spirit, close to the cover of the mythical album “Sergeant Pepper’s lonely hearts club band”, by the Beatles, the mural portrays, Rivas points out, a handful of winners “who do not want to seem like individual winners, but rather merged with their people. And that is building. The work will occupy, he announced, a room located in front of the place where the Foundation is building its most imminent project, the Individual Sovereignty Agency, aimed at supporting victims of abuse belonging to especially vulnerable groups.