Advertising in brazil

Advertising in Brazil
International Advertising

Brazil Is Different
• Brazil enjoys an international reputation for producing some of
the world's most creative advertising.
• The mere mention of Brazil to advertising professionals evokes
images of innovative, appealing print ads and commercials.
• Many that have taken top prizes at the Cannes Lions
International Advertising Festival and other international
competitions.
• A creative revolution took place in Brazil in the 1980s and
1990s.
• Today we explore some of the factors giving rise to the high
level of creativity in Brazilian advertising and examines some
recent campaigns that reflect the Brazilian style of advertising

The Place of Advertising in Brazilian
Society
• Generally speaking, Brazilians like and admire
advertising, especially when it is entertaining.
It is accepted and tolerated to a much higher
degree than in the United States.
• Marcio Moreira, Vice Chairman and Chief
Talent Officer of McCann Worldgroup, and
native Brazilian, puts it this way: The Brazilian
public is a sucker for advertising!
• It's an environment in which advertising
people are stars.

Society
• advertising is ubiquitous in Brazil. Familiar
venues for advertising include television,
billboards and signs in city streets, magazines,
newspapers, and electronic media. Evening
soap operas (telenovelas) are extremely
popular and, along with sporting events,
especially soccer, provide some of the most
coveted advertising space.

Society
• Models as well as producers of advertisements often
achieve celebrity status in Brazil. Gossip magazines
report on the private lives of top advertising
executives, adding to their celebrity status.
• Washington Olivetto, a well-known advertising
executive, was kidnapped and held for ransom for
nearly 2 months in 2002.
• Gisele Bündchen, a top model who appears in her own
company's advertisements for sandals is among the
most recognizable people in Brazil.
• There are even rumors that a well-placed advertising
executive may shortly run for presidency in Brazil.

Society
The regard with which advertising is held, the
public's acceptance of it, and the celebrity status
of advertising stars set a backdrop against which
Brazilian advertising manages its creative verve.

Society
• Nowadays ad agencies in Brazil include two major
types.
• First, many well-known multinational agencies like
BBDO, DDB, Draftfcb, Grey, JWT, Leo Burnett, McCann
Erickson, Ogilvy, TBWA, Saatchi and Saatchi, and Y&R
have a strong presence in Brazil and service
multinational accounts as well as some local ones.
• Second, there are a small number of extraordinarily
successful Brazilian agencies (including Africa, Almap,
DM9, and W/Brasil) that grew up in the last two
decades and enjoy distinction as some of the world's
most creative agencies. São Paulo is both the primary
business capital of Brazil and the nerve center of
Brazilian advertising.

Creative Department at McCann
Erickson in São Paulo

The Run-Up to the Creative Boom
• In 1929, the J. Walter Thompson Advertising Agency of
New York opened an office in São Paulo, bringing with
it the international advertising standards of the time
that included the latest market strategies and research
techniques. The ostensible reason for this expansion
into Brazil was to service its major client, General
Motors, which had just opened a manufacturing plant
in Brazil.
• Similar GM plants and accompanying JWT offices were
opened in more than 20 locations around the world
during the 1920s.
• Another American agency, N.W. Ayer & Son,
established offices wherever the Ford Motor Company
had its manufacturing plants.

• The establishment of Brazilian offices was no
simple matter for the American agencies.
• Typically one or two expatriates opened the
office and began the search for local managers
and creative talent. Since they were unable to
find people trained specifically to manage ad
agencies or to create ads, they hired managers
who had been trained in law, journalism, or
finance and creative people from the world of
writers and artists.

• As a result, the advertising from this period tended to
be rather formal. Typical ads showed products and
consumers in highly idealized situations.
• Although JWT, Ayer, and other American agencies
initiated a shift in both the tone and style of Brazilian
advertising, their influence was actually short lived.
The Great Depression led to the closing of Brazilian and
most other foreign GM and Ford manufacturing plants
and, in turn, the American advertising branch offices. It
was not until after World War II that foreign agencies
opened or reopened offices in Brazil.

• Brazil, however, remained more or less a closed
market for goods produced outside the country
until the 1990s when a shift in economic policy
resulted in a re-growth of involvement in
international and global markets both in terms of
what Brazil produced and purchased.
• In addition to companies like Coke, McDonald's,
and Sony that sold less expensive items, Brazil
became in the 1990s a market for luxury
consumer goods and top international brands like
Gucci, Chanel, BMW, and the like.

• As elsewhere in the world, the economy drives
advertising in Brazil. Today Brazil has the world's 9th
largest economy and a population of over 183,000,000
people. There are great differences within Brazil—from
extraordinarily wealthy consumers in the big cities of
Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo to the urban poor of
thefavela slums and remote rural areas of Amazonia.
• Today, television operates as a force to unite Brazil's
diverse population. Most programs are, of course,
sponsored, and, thus, accompanying advertisements
play an important role in constructing common values,
desires, and lifestyles in Brazil.

Why Is Brazilian Advertising So
Creative?
• The most popular programming continues to be the
evening news and the telenovelas that run at 7 and 8
o'clock. It is difficult to overstate the loyalty to and
interest in the telenovela in Brazil. Faithful audiences
include housewives, domestic workers, laborers, office
workers, men as well as women, and they generally cut
across social classes and categories reaching perhaps
90% of households.
• Whole families arrange their days so as not to miss the
nightly episodes. Viewers become involved in the plots,
frequently imitating the actors and discussing the
comings-and-goings in the stories with their friends,
families, and neighbors. The associated commercial
slots form nearly perfect media opportunities for
advertisers.

Creative?
• In addition, many products are used and talked about
in the soap operas themselves, making product
placement a familiar and highly successful marketing
device. Other great loves of the Brazilian people are
soccer and carnival—both of which create important
advertising venues as well.
• Creative boom began in Brazilian advertising in the
1960s. Alex Periscinoto, a co-founder of the Almap
agency, spent time in New York in the early part of the
decade working with Bill Bernbach, father of the
American Creative Revolution and the most influential
figure in American advertising in the 1960s.

Creative?
• A few years later, three Europeans, Roberto
Duailibi, Francesc Petit, and José Zaragosa,
founded DPZ, an advertising agency that
brought a European feel and sophistication in
art to Brazil. These two movements came
together in Brazil—modern advertising
techniques based on Bernbach's revolutionary
style with beautiful layouts and exquisite
photography from the European advertising
tradition. The combination ignited Brazilian
creativity.

Creative?
• During the 1970s, young creatives from DPZ and Almap
began founding agencies of their own, effectively
spreading the movement around the major cities of
the country.
• The Brazilians continued to pay attention to other
international advertising trends, from which they drew
further inspiration.
• At the same time, Brazilian advertising began to
address consumers in a more colloquial voice rather
than continuing the more formal language used in the
past. This brought advertising closer to consumers and
they responded positively to ads that spoke to them
like they talk to their friends. This new style was "very
engaging, humorous, and 'very Brazilian.

Creative?
Brazilian advertising thus faced two critical issues in the
1990s—having campaigns that would work all over Latin
America, and looking toward the possibility of winning
international awards that would garner increased attention
and ultimately more business.
• A major obstacle inhibiting achievement of either goal was
the Portuguese language, which, although the official
language for Brazilians who constitute 51% of Latin
American population, is typically unknown in the other 12
countries of South America. This linguistic block precluded
others understanding and admiring even the most brilliant
copy. Moreover, puns, jokes, and other forms of language
play did not translate well. Thus, Brazilian advertising
became much more dependent on visual communication.

Creative?

Creative?
• Brazil had begun winning international awards
for its advertising as early as the 1970s. This
continued through the 1980s and emerged as
a major trend in the 1990s. An example of this
early award-winning advertising from the year
1987 is the commercial for Kaiser Beer created
by the DPZ agency.

Why Is Brazilian Advertising So Creative?
• During the 1990s, a new generation of creative
people who had established reputations from the
previous decade moved on to found or head their
own independent agencies. The best known of these
are Washington Olivetto, Nizan Guanaes, and
Marcello Serpa. Each of their agencies was a center
of excellence, and each competed with the others for
clients. This frenetic competition eventually led to
these agencies trying to outdo the others in terms of
creativity, the most important yardstick for which
would be the prizes won in international
competitions.

Fake Award Winning Ads
• Many creatives felt stifled by the constraints of their
clients' needs and strategies, and thus emerged the
phenomenon of creating commercials strictly for the
international competitions. Most of these commercials
never aired even a single time, but several picked up
international prizes for their extraordinary creativity.
• For the first time, the Cannes Lions International
Festival of Creativity banned agency creatives from
next year's festival after stripping independent
Brazilian shop Moma Propaganda of two Lions won at
the Cannes awards for apparently fake ads for Kia
Motors Brazil.

• After the June festival, a firestorm of bad
publicity swept social media, criticizing the
campaign for overtones of lust and pedophilia.
Automotive News, Ad Age 's sibling publication,
described the two print and outdoor ads,
intended to promote the Kia Sportage's dual-zone
hot-and-cold climate control feature, as comic
strip-style scenarios with family-friendly images
on one side, juxtaposed with racy, adult fantasies
on the other, including a male teacher helping an
elementary school girl.
• When Kia denied approving the ads, the festival
investigated.

• The Cannes Lions rules state clearly that if
requested, proof must be provided that
campaigns ran and were legitimately created
for a fee-paying client.

Selling Corn Flakes to People Who Skip
Breakfast
• A significant breakfast is not a part of Brazilian
culture, certainly not an American-style
breakfast that includes breakfast cereal. This
did not stop Kellogg from attempting to make
it so. J. Walter Thompson/Brazil advised
Kellogg to use product placement
in telenovelas as a strategy to entice potential
Brazilian consumers. They based their
reasoning on the fact that consumers tend to
imitate the actors in telenovelas.

The Body Beautiful in Brazilian
Advertising
• It is hard to understate the importance of sex in
Brazilian public life. It is discussed on TV shows,
magazines, and everyday life. On the beaches of
Rio and in the Carnival parades, sexuality is on
display. One of the first things that foreigners
notice in Brazil is the extraordinary focus on
nearly nude bodies, sensual clothing, and overt
expressions of sex. Most of the bodies on display
are female, although emphasis on male beauty is
also a part of Brazilian culture.

Advertising
• We just go to society and pick up what's
happening there and put it back in advertising.
It's not something we are ashamed of. It's on TV
at prime time. Everybody's watching and people
here grow up with that. You go to the beach, it's
like that.
• Sex is definitely a part of our day-by-day
discussions everywhere. It's very difficult for
Americans or maybe the British to understand
how it works, but the moment they live here,
they get it. Advertising is linked to how society is
structured, and advertising just reflects that.

Advertising
• The openness with which Brazilian ads treat the human
body stands in stark contrast to a disdain for
expressions of violence in ads. Brazilians are
accustomed to hearing about violence and corruption
in society but that they do not like it in their films, TV
programs, or ads.
• They want media to express alternatives and
aspirations to the social problems of poverty, street
crime, and corporate and government corruption.
• No guns, no thievery, no thieves, no assaults, no jokes
about killing people, or death because people don't like
it. People react badly—but a naked body or sexuality in
the sense of erotic sexuality, it will go nicely. It's a
cultural phenomenon.

Creativity over Strategy
• Award-winning campaign was for a Brazilian
soft drink, Diet Guarana. The two-page spread
featured only a bronzed stomach
(alternatively, female, lighter-skinned male,
darker-skinned male) and a Diet Guarana
bottle cap positioned at the same height as
the model's navel on the opposite page.
• The Creative Director wanted to portray the
product as a beauty product as well.

Three Leaders in Brazilian Advertising
Washington Olivetto
• Olivetto has received more Cannes Lions than any other
figure in the world of advertising—more than 50. He is
listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the creator of the
longest-running advertising campaign with the same
leading character. The series, which appears in both print
and TV, features comedian Carlos Moreno impersonating
various celebrities, politicians and icons, including Che
Guevara, and the Mona Lisa. Since its inception in 1978,
there have been almost 350 different executions.
• This campaign for Bombril, a household cleaner, is much
loved by Brazilians who anxiously await Moreno's next
impersonation. So popular are the spots that they are listed
in programming guides. When the company attempted to
change the campaign in 2004, the public demanded its
revival.

Nizan Guanaes
• The desire to win more international prizes led Guanaes,
according to some of his critics, to start a trend that
focused more on creativity than strategy. Guanaes went on
to win other Cannes Lions. His campaign for Parmalat milk
reflects the creative heights that DM9 reached during the
1990s. Critics of the creativity-before-strategy approach use
this example to illustrate the process of a creative director
looking for a brand where he could use his creative idea.
Apparently, a creative director at DM9 had seen a display of
photographs of children dressed like animals at a New York
show. Guanaes liked the idea and wanted to adapt it to a
campaign

Marcello Serpa
• Serpa's award-winning campaign was for a Brazilian
soft drink, Diet Guarana. The two-page spread featured
only a bronzed stomach (alternatively, female, lighterskinned male, darker-skinned male) and a Diet Guarana
bottle cap positioned at the same height as the
model's navel on the opposite page. Serpa thinks that
this campaign embodies his preference for visual over
verbal communication, and he believes that it won
because it communicated its message both simply and
powerfully.

Outdoor in Brazil
• Imagine a city of 11 million inhabitants stripped of all its
advertising. It’s nearly impossible when the clutter and
color of our current urban landscapes seem inextricably
entwined with the golden arches of McDonald’s or the
deep reds of Coca-Cola.
• Yet for the residents of São Paulo, Brazil, this doesn’t
require imagination: city dwellers simply have to walk
down the street and look around to see a city devoid of
advertisements.
• In September 2006, São Paulo’s populist mayor, Gilberto
Kassab, passed the so-called “Clean City Law," outlawing
the use of all outdoor advertisements, including on
billboards, transit, and in front of stores.

Outdoor in Brazil
• São Paulo continues to exist without
advertisements. But instead of causing
economic ruin and deteriorating aesthetics, 70
percent of city residents find the ban
beneficial, according to a 2011 survey.
Unexpectedly, the removal of logos and
slogans exposed previously overlooked
architecture, revealing a rich urban beauty
that had been long hidden.

Advertising in brazil

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