Hands walk through the city, wait for the subway, play sports, enjoy a pool or sunbathe. They behave like people, although they lack faces and bodies. They all wear an Oura smart ring, the element around which “Wear Your Best Life” revolves, the new campaign from the Finnish wellness technology brand.
The initiative, developed by the independent agency Nice&Frank and directed by Sam Walker, from the production company Superprime, proposes a visual universe in which hands are the protagonists and daily life takes place in a city built to suit them. The result combines humor, movement and careful artisanal production to convey the idea that well-being has different meanings for each person and is not always related to improving physical performance.
Oura thus seeks to expand the conversation around its product, a smart ring capable of monitoring more than 50 indicators related to health and well-being, including sleep and different aspects of women’s health.
“Much health technology speaks to people as if there is a single goal. Our users don’t live like that”explains Doug Sweeny, Oura Marketing Director. “Some are pursuing personal bests, others are simply trying to sleep through the night, and others are managing chronic health issues.”
A city made by hand
The creative idea was born from a problem related to the characteristics of the product. The Oura ring is so small that it can lose prominence on screen, especially when it appears integrated into scenes of everyday life.
The Nice&Frank team decided to solve it by making the hands themselves transform into characters. In this way, the ring naturally occupies a central place in each sequence.
He has transformed the hands into characters to give greater prominence to Oura’s small smart ring
“The way to achieve this was to make the hands the main characters”explains Laura Petruccelli, Co-founder and Creative Director of Nice&Frank, in statements to Little Black Book. From that idea, the team developed what they internally named “Oura Handthem”, a play on words between hands (hand) and anthem (hymn), to define a celebration of everyday life starring hands.
The execution required building a physical world at a 1:10 scale. Filming took place in Prague, where 35 model specialists worked for three weeks on the sets, with the collaboration of Superprime and the service production company Unit+Sofa.
The scenes created include a street approximately six meters long, working subway cars, a rooftop pool with real water, a skate park and a motorized miniature taxi.
The team paid special attention to the details that allow us to recognize human features on the hands: sun marks, clothing sleeves, nails or accessories. There are even humorous references to everyday situations, such as an ultrasound of a baby’s hand. The city also incorporates small narrative elements, from storefronts to a police station named Metacarpal Police Precinct, in reference to the bones of the hand. And the ad dispenses with dialogue and uses gestures, movement and visual humor to build the story.
To bring the characters to life, there was a group of performers specialized in hand movements, violinists, jugglers and practitioners of fingerboardinga discipline that reproduces the movements of skateboarding using fingers and small boards. The participants came from 14 countries and their movements were coordinated by Lilach Chen, a finger dance specialist.
“In the world of AI, we all want handmade, tangible things. They seem more valuable than ever,” explains Petruccelli, who highlights the importance of treating hands with the same care that human characters would receive.
For Matt Kipper, Creative Manager at Oura, physically building that universe was a way to transfer the company’s values to advertising production itself. “For a brand so committed to real hands and real people, building this world by hand was a subtle way to show our values”he explains. And he considers that the imagination and work of the professionals involved gave the result an emotion that would hardly have been achieved through artificial intelligence.
The campaign thus takes advantage of the contrast between a technological product and artisanal execution. The ring represents the ability to obtain information about the body, while the movements and small scenes recall the human experiences that this information can help to understand.
“Wear Your Best Life” continues a line of communication that Oura had already developed with “Give Us the Finger”, a campaign focused on the index finger that proposed a vision of aging linked to the enjoyment of everyday activities.
On that occasion, the brand showed its ring in situations that went beyond physical exercise, such as playing the piano or playing chess.
“It is another moment for the brand, but it maintains the same essence”says Kipper. As he explains, while “Give Us the Finger” sought to draw attention with a different perspective on aging, “Wear Your Best Life” celebrates a growing community of people interested in taking care of their health.
“We choose to tell this story through hands because they are very personal. With them we work, create, care for others and move during the day”explains Sweeny. The director adds that dispensing with faces allows different people to recognize each other in the scenes.
The campaign premiered on October 8, with 30 and 60 second audiovisual versions, dissemination on Oura’s social networks and outdoor advertising activations.
