In Brazil, Branded Content and Branded Entertainment haven’t yet reached their full maturity. As consumers grow more open to content initiatives developed by brands, the industry is stuck to the traditional communication strategies. There is still disproportionate focus on media buying as production budgets seem to shrink. The results are predominantly measured by the number of impacts, as opposed to engagement and dialogue with the consumer.

However, as a result of high quality and creative work developed by the scarce agencies that specialize in these disciplines, content has gained relevance and attention in the brand’s marketing plans in the past few years. Slowly, content has been proving to be an important tool in the building of relationships between brands and their audiences.

The internet is the environment with the highest creation and distribution potential for content in Brazil. The demand for digital content is considerably higher than the offer, this scenario is the opposite for traditional media, which means there is incredible potential to grow engagement and to build a relationship with the consumer inside the web. As a consequence, brand managers have been forced to re-evaluate their premises on what is a strategic split between their media and production investment levels.

The inspiration for the creative idea came from the YouTube pre-roll media format. We knew our target was there, but how to make them not skip the video that would tell them the difference between body spray and antiperspirant? The greatest challenge in this format is to have content relevant enough to keep the consumer’s attention and interest levels high enough to prevent them from going straight to the video they were looking for in the first place. So, by understanding the format, we were able to use it’s obstacles in our favor to make the ad a great success.

The idea generated buzz everywhere. The whole video was watched more than 2m times. On facebook, the number of people “talking about this” went from 800 to 67.913. The average of likes per week went from 22,000 to 90,000. On Youtube, the brand channel went from 216.000 views to 2.380.635.

In other words, more than 3m guys didn't skip our video - a rate 20% higher than the usual. One out of every three people impacted by the ad watched until the end.