During an official match in Peru’s soccer tournament, a fan was killed. The country was shocked and the government decreed the rest of the championship would be closed to the public. El Bocón, as a newspaper, is the country’s leading sports journal; but as a brand, it is a true sports fan and as such, it had to act.

The challenge was to rise above the clutter of anti-violence messages that were surfacing in every media, with a potent idea that could really commit society in the fight against violence, so that the authorities would not need to take more drastic measures like shutting down the entire soccer championship.

Our strategy was to appeal to Peruvians well known football passion, in order to make them aware that violence, besides being a threat to life, was a threat to the existence of the very sport they love.

The concept: “Violence will make soccer disappear”.

As a leading brand and huge sports fan, El Bocón needed to go beyond only saying something, to effectively doing something, not just informing but acting.

To bring the concept to life we launched the journal’s daily edition with absolutely no soccer news. In a country where nearly all of the sports coverage is about football, that meant an almost blank newspaper. A huge risk for the client, who was removing from its product the very reason why people buy it. But we were determined to do something about the problem and there was no better way of showing what violence would do to soccer than having people live for one day, in a soccer-less world.

The campaign was an immediate success. From the initial impact in newsstands to the free media coverage by news programs and our newspaper competitors, they all praised the brand’s initiative. In the digital world the campaign was replicated in 500 web pages and blogs and approximately 1 million 200 thousand people saw the execution that same day. Finally, the government and the soccer authorities agreed to handle the problem in a more constructive way, saving the championship.