Santander is one of the top banks in Brazil. One of the leaders when people look for loans, credit cards, investments, everything a bank can offer. Well, almost everything.

Despite its wide offer of insurance policies, people overlook Santander when considering insurance. We were only the 11th brand to be remembered when people think of insurance.

In addition to this, Brazilians are irrational optimists. According to research conducted by Oxford (2020) among the countries with the greatest economic potential for the insurance market, Brazilians are the ones with less personal and family protection insurance.

We needed to convince people that Santander is a reliable option to be better prepared for what can inevitably go wrong. We needed a bold, memorable stunt to get into people’s minds and become a strong player in a market that soared after the pandemic began.

To increase our awareness in the insurance industry, we needed to make noise. Well, like many brands have done before, we went after an influencer. However, ours had zero followers on social media. His PR potential came from something else.

We picked the heir to the greatest pessimist history has ever seen: Edward Murphy the Third, son of the creator of Murphy’s Law.

A man who has heard his entire life that “anything that can go wrong will go wrong”.

But just an endorsement wasn’t enough. We insured him. For real. AFTER ALL, ONLY A SAFELY INSURED WORLDWIDE ICON OF PESSIMISM COULD BREAK BRAZILIAN’S IRRATIONAL OPTIMISM.

Think about it: if Santander insurance is good enough for the son of a man who created a law stating that everything would go wrong, it must be good enough for us, regular joes.

Murphy’s law has been subject of movies, cartoons, it’s present in popular culture and belief. But no one has ever seen a face that represented it.

Our PR strategy was to bring the family of the creator of the law into the spotlight, with full coverage Santander insurance. And to create a powerful campaign that delivered this ironic plot twist in a remarkable way.

That’s because a bank saying that “things can go wrong” is boring.

But the world’s bad luck ambassador gave the campaign far greater repercussions in the media and popular culture.

Even without social networks and hyper resistant to the internet, Mr. Murphy’s (positive)power of impact was to become a spontaneous topic in the main newspapers and magazines in the country.

So much so that not only did the campaign gain notoriety, but our poster boy had his (lucky) moment under the spotlight of the Brazilian media.

The first step was to find Edward Murphy the Third. Which wasn’t really an easy task, since he’s a shy, recluse man with no social media profiles.

Then, we had to convince him, not only to act as a spokesperson, but to become our insurance client. Then, we signed the contract.

Next, we had to communicate the news. But we couldn’t resort to Ed’s social media for that since he hasn’t got any. So we resorted to ours.

And created a film introducing Ed and announcing our newest insurance client, that overcame any kind of pessimism and performed well on different formats like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and a nationwide TV campaign.

Our campaign with Murphy was a success: 89% of people reached by our campaign approved it, generating a result of more than 5 million complete views of the film on digital. Of course, 11% didn’t think so highly of it. We blame Murphy’s law for that.

Telling people that things can go wrong is not very easy, but choosing the most pessimistic guy in the world as an insurance influencer has proved to be a winning strategy to put Santander in the consumers’ race: with just over 73% of generation of positive conversation, Santander got a 20% rise in consideration and a 29% rise in recommendation. The business result, converted into insurance sales, was even more expressive and you, the jury, can satisfy your curiosity in the confidential session below.