Alcohol abuse is a very serious health problem in Brazil. With more than 100.000 deaths by car accidents every year, with drunk driving being the second biggest cause of these fatalities.

As the largest brewery in the world, social and corporate responsibility is in Ambev's DNA.

For more than a decade, Ambev organizes initiatives to defend responsible drinking practices. It participates in discussions of the World Health Organization (WHO) on the effects of inappropriate consumption of alcoholic beverages and several other initiatives to raise public awareness about the risks of irresponsible drinking.

The campaign brief was to create a non-product based powerful social responsibility message to impact the public about the risks and consequences of drinking and driving.

The campaign would also collaborate to the “Yellow May” movement: a month dedicated to draw the attention to the high rate of deaths and injuries in traffic around the world.

The campaign is based on an insight that’s also an universal truth about alcohol: sometimes you drink and everything seems to in order. But it’s not.

So we used a unique design technique that works on a similar way as when people drink. It deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteers be at the rghit pclae.

At first glance, our brain can still understand it. Only when reading more carefully, you can notice the spelling mistake.

With this technique, we came up with a simple and powerful visual craftmanship. We scrambled the letters of the logos of the world's most famous beers. At first, people couldn’t notice the difference. But with a closer look at our labels, they could tell something had changed and relate to the dangers of drinking and driving.

We started the campaign by changing the beers themselves. A re-designed special edition made to provoke the attention trough the error on the labels.

On the first phase of the campaign (provocation), we distributed the special edition to dozens of bars. The labels were also displayed in TV appearances, magazines, newspapers, influencers, social media formats and OOH. We didn’t tell anyone about the change.

On the second phase (interaction), thousands of people noticed the “errors” and shared it on social networks. More than 200.000 mentions in the first 24 hours.

After 24 hours, we revealed our awareness message on the third phase (revelation). We answered thousands of people one-to-one on social media and used a multimedia strategy to reach as many platforms possible.

On the fourth phase (reactions), thousands of people, news channels and influencers talked about the campaign. This time, they understood the idea and complimented the initiative.

In the opening game of the biggest football championship in the country, all TV inserts of the beer Brahma were changed to "Bhamra", without explanations. People blamed the TV broadcaster and Ambev for the “mistake”.

Then, influencers (sports commentators, humorists, celebrities and musicians) echoed the error and shared other images of different beers with their wrong labels that they had seen in bars, OOH and POP.

At the same time, we exchanged the bottle labels in strategic bars to capture spontaneous reactions. Images of the “wrong” bottles became memes and fired into Whatsapp.

Meanwhile, all brand social networks changed their profile pictures and covers, and the news quickly spread, generating rumors about what was happening.

The next morning, all the ads revealed the reason for the "error" and we answered thousands of people one-to-one on social media and the campaign became news in many portals from Brazil and the world.

The “Dirnk Repsnosilby” campaign was spontaneously picked up by the main media channels in the country, such as Ads of the World, LatinSpots.com, Exame Magazine, UOL Portal and many others. It also gathered other impressive results:

- 619.000 interactions in the first 48 hours

- Google search increased 1550% in just 24 hours

- Engagement was an incredible 15.6%

- 157 million impressions