Cannes Lions

The Impossible Comeback

BOOST BRAND ACCELERATOR, Barranco / YOLEIT / 2024

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Overview

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Credits

Overview

Background

Pedro Suárez-Vértiz, the most famous and beloved Peruvian musician of the 90's rock wave and Peruvian music history, lost the ability to speak in the peak of his career because of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a fatal motor neuron disease that causes him Dysarthria, a motor speech disorder that made him never be able to sing again.

Yoleit, an iconic and beloved Peruvian yogurt also of the 90´s was coming back to the market in 2023 with the concept "The good always comes back", so they weren´t going to comeback alone.

Idea

Before losing his ability to speak, Pedro Suárez-Vértiz wrote one last song that he never got to sing: "My Love, I Lost Faith In You", so with the help of Artificial Intelligence, Yoleit recreated the voice of Pedro Suárez-Vértiz to achieve the impossible: make him be the voice of it's comeback singing this new song many years after losing his voice.

Strategy

Yogurt Yoleit, a Peruvian icon from the 90s, was returning to the market after many years, and to do so successfully, it knew it had to attract the attention of the entire country.

So we decided to appeal to a very strong feeling among Peruvians: nostalgia.

Under that context, a totally unexpected alliance but one that all Peruvians needed was the best strategy to create a buzz.

This is how we decided that the best way to return to the market was to make a reality something that all Peruvians missed: hearing Pedro's Suárez-Vértiz voice again, another Peruvian icon of the 90s, in a new song many years after losing his voice due to a rare illness, something that was made possible thanks to AI.

The combination of nostalgia and surprise guarantees that this idea will make national news, which in the end ended up happening.

Execution

We spend months of work day and night using Google Colab to process hundreds of files of Pedro's voice in the studio, concerts and interviews to achieve a voice almost identical to the one all Peruvian remembers.

Once we had the perfect inflections, voice nuances and tones we made the AI sing the song Pedro never had the chance to sing.

We launched the song with a videoclip in Yoleit's Youtube account accesible exclusively with a QR code in Yoleit's yogurt bottles, making people all around the country go to super and mini markets just to find the yogurt.

Once the song was realized the country went crazy but not only for Pedro but for Yoleit, thanking the brand for achieving a nation dream: to make Pedro sing again.

We then release the song in Pedro's Spotify and Youtube accounts.

Outcome

Once the song was released it became a nationwide hit, putting the brand in every mouth from people in social media to press in TV, radio and newspapers.

This resulted in Yoleit being the brand with the most successful product relaunch of the year in Peru, as well as making Pedro's new song being Peru's most streamed release of the last decade.

The strategy of having a QR Code in our bottles for people to listen to the song exclusively worked very well achieving an increase of 227% in yogurt sales.

Finnally, we had 97M organic impressions and 6M earned media with 0 media investment.