There are few celebrities in the world with more global reach than J Balvin, his rise to musical stardom was meteoric. He has spent 15 years building his fan-base and today he has tens of millions of loyal followers who not only show up on his social media channels, but show up in real life for his concerts. Bring that star power together with the Super Bowl? Unstoppable.

Super Bowl LVIII was a huge moment for the hispanic audience in the US. It marked the first time that Univision hosted a Spanish-language broadcast of the Super Bowl with a separate advertising inventory.

To celebrate the first ever Spanish-language broadcast of the Super Bowl on Univision, Verizon not only wanted to engage with their hispanic audience, but also prove the strength of the Verizon network through an impressive feat, and before the eyes of the entire world. The objective? Demonstrate that no matter what you do, breaking the Verizon network is absolutely impossible.

We came up with and idea that was framed as a question: what would happen if we leak the

phone number of a global celebrity LIVE, during a Super Bowl commercial?

We thought that the outcome, as the phone number gets bombarded with thousands of calls, texts, photos and videos, could be the ultimate test to prove the power of the Verizon network. It was risky, but the client was gutsy enough to go for it.

So we partnered with J Balvin, and we created a TV commercial where he leaked his number on the fictional world. And at the same time the spot was on air, J Balvin leaked his number too, on his Social Media channels.

We treated the Super Bowl as a brand building moment, continuing to create connections with Low to Mid Acculturated Latino people. Our target audience makes up 87% of Univision’s viewership. They're heavily responsible for establishing the New Mainstream where multicultural audiences drive culture especially online, yet there’s still a cognitive dissonance that Latinos are expected to conform. In accepting that Latinos are tired of having to adapt to a world that doesn’t get them, we chose to adapt an American cultural moment to Latinos. The partnership with J Balvin was timely since Jose was starting to make his return to the public eye, giving Verizon a clear way-in to engage with his fandom online before he announced his 2024 global tour. We activated our Latino brand strategy of “Verizon gives me the control to adapt the world to me” and gave our audience “unlimited access” to the Prince of Reggeaton.

What happened when fans called to the leaked phone number?

This was the hardest part to execute of the whole idea: making it engaging and interactive for everyone. When people called, a J Balvin recorded voicemail message asked them to text him instead, because his phone “was on fire”. To ensure every single fan who texted him got an enjoyable experience out of it, we worked in collaboration with Open AI to create a deep learning language model that could reply as J Balvin would. Mimicking his tone of voice, expressions and emojis. So fans felt as if they were exchanging messages with Balvin himself.

On average, each person who sent a message to J Balvin spent over 9 minutes interacting with the AI. 9 minutes is no small feat, especially for a ChatGPT conversation. We also had over 49.3 million Instagram views in the first 24 hours, our social channels grew 742%, and the campaign had over 1.2 Billion impressions. Plus, February sales were over 12.4% higher year over year. And, the best part, the network didn’t skip a beat.