Summer is coming, and AC commercials emerge from the cave, talking about technology, functionalities, always with the promise of “refreshing people’s lives”.

How can we say something different when basically, we offer similar products to our competitors? We needed to call someone who did something basically the same as what others do, but in a totally different way. A #1.

Being so close to the FIFA World Cup, and of course, being Argentinian, the first person that came to our mind was…our #1. So he was our main inspiration for our AC commercial.

In Argentina we have our own specific way of saying many things.

When someone is a little crazy, we say that "he’s got some players missing". When someone is swindled, we say "he got slept off”

And when someone is very similar to another person, we say "they have an air".

We took advantage of this last phrase, and we did a campaign for our air conditioning brand, Philco.

We called the Messi look-alike. We took pictures of him with many different products and we allowed any brand to download them, so they could use it as the official face of their brands.

We gave them the face that everyone wants to have, but just a few can, especially on the eve of the football World’s Cup.

In times like this, the last thing people need are brands approaching them in an aspirational way. We needed to sell them a product but mostly, we had to make them enjoy the process. With this starting point, the creative idea came out. But we needed to make sure our audience was going to be receptive.

So we’ve carried out 4 focus groups on our target audience: men and women, 30-55 y/o who had bought (or planned to) an AC during the past 2 years. We tested it. People went crazy about it. Close to the FIFA world cup, in a country where people basically breathe soccer, we put the most wanted face (and lefty) as the commercial’s protagonist, without actually doing it. Results confirmed two things: we had solid ground to move forward. And the Messi look alike was about to become a star.

We developed an image bank in our e-commerce channel, where the owners of different businesses could enter and download the image of our Messi that best suits their activity, for them to use on their businesses.

To communicate the action we launched the campaign promoting our air conditioners with his image everywhere and we created different content to invite everyone to download the photos and use our Messi as the official face of their brands.

We developed a television commercial to introduce the action, 7 commercials for social media, each one focused on a different activity, and billboards around the country.

The results of the campaign exceeded expectations.

137,821 air conditioning units were sold, which represents an increase in sales of 42% over the 20-21 season. and is equivalent to a 34% market share.

On TV we reached 70% coverage and a high frequency of 18, reaching 5,200 million people.

On digital platforms we activated the campaign with a reach objective, we achieved a reach of 14.3 million users and we managed to exceed the views objective.

But the most important thing is that we manage to connect with our target and make them smile in a context where laughter and humor are increasingly important.