2018/19 were very positive years for Nissin as a company in Brazil - increased sales, improved market share and brand awareness. The rule went up, as did the sales targets for the following year.

Traditionally, the brand's best-selling flavor is Chicken. The proposed challenge was to give visibility to the other 10 available flavors, which are the great strength of Nissin front the competitors, which normally only works with 4 or 5 basic flavors.

Unlike other brand campaigns, this was supposed to be just a simple digital campaign, with a smaller budget, addressing recipes and with a humorous tone, like everything done by Nissin.

The briefing's objectives were: to increase trial in all flavors of the Nissin Lámen line, in addition to the traditionally best-selling ones (Chicken, for example).

We brought ‘Clélio’s Temakiojo’ to life. A family restaurant with an original recipe sold in 11 different flavors - all made with Brazilian Temaki – a very unusual choice of food. Brazilians are already very creative when it comes to do a Temaki, but we wanted to push the bar. We created a channel for the restaurant on Youtube and started to post their advertising videos.

To promote in an unbranded way, we partnered with two Instagram channels responsible for distributing the Brazilian best memes on the internet.

We waited a few days to see the reactions and published the videos on Nissin's official pages without revealing that they were actually a brand campaign, but with the question “Is it really good?”

After a few more shared videos, we published a final video saying that it was actually a campaign by Nissin Lámen.

The campaign's insight came from multiple inspirations:

The first is the Temaki - a Japanese recipe very adapted by Brazilians. In Brazil, they are made with different ingredients and the combinations are endless. With Nissin Lámen, the connection would become clear: different flavors to be explored within the countless recipes.

This option had never appeared as a suggestion in the thousands of recipes that the brand receives from consumers, which was important to ensure the element of surprise for the idea.

Another source of inspiration were classic Brazilian ads that go viral on the internet because they are awkward and homemade, which end up becoming great memes.

However, what really made the difference and what made the idea have more impact was the method we chose to run the campaign: publish initially unbranded and not as a product campaign, but as a restaurant specialized in Temakiojo.

Considering the limited budget, we decided to bet on the strategy that a normal restaurant would follow when launching its advertising: we created a Youtube channel, and we started to upload the videos, without media investment and with few views.

We created a character called Clélio and his family. He, creative, decided to advertise his restaurant together with his business partner and his family, all responsible for telling how wonderful Temakiojo was. To make everything even more real, we added music, performances and a “corny” aesthetic.

We partnered with meme channels on social media to generate the initial conversations around the videos, and waited for the responses to go for the next step.

We also made partnerships with influencers, but Nissin consumers acted strongly as great investigators to know if that was real or not, really helping on the narrative we planned to built.

The campaign reached more than 60 million impressions and 15 million views. Clélio’s Temakiojo channel had over 140k organic views.

High engagement results: Countless people changing their Twitter username to Temakiojo; comments praising and playing with the campaign on the original Youtube channel; People dressed as Clélio for the carnival. All of them proof that the idea really became a meme.

In earned media, an article published in Folha de São Paulo newspaper - at the moment when we did not reveal that it was in fact a Nissin campaign - in which the journalist comments on the absurdity and the “greatness” of an advertising piece like that.

In the month of the campaign, a considerable increase in the sales of all flavors was detected. Excluding the brand's best-selling flavor, the rest of the SKU’s increased by 22.6%. The second best-selling flavor had a 28% increase in sales.