DDB Brasil, a national and international reference when it comes to creative power: the only Brazilian agency holding 4 Agency of the Year awards, 2 Grand Prix and more than 100 Lions at the Cannes Festival. The brand is structured with strong and solid values: TURMADM9 – Talent, Sense of Urgency, Results, Management, Owner’s Attitude, Determination, Mobilization, and Belief in the number 9 (reminding us that we are always capable of doing better). An agency built by talents who are passionate for advertising and are committed to the business’ sustainability: one of the few Brazilian agencies to hold the GRI Sustainability Report with Level B and the only Communication company to win, for two consecutive years, the title of “One of The Best Companies To Start Career”, published by Você S.A. Magazine. Pioneer agency in convergent thinking: works with a connected reality, where digital thinking is completely integrated in the communication and in the process of brand construction.
DDB Brasil Team celebrating the agency’s surpassing of the 100th Lion mark at Cannes Festival
Creatives’ Desks and President’s Room
Alcir Leite, COO; Marco Versolato, Creative VP; Sergio Valente, President, celebrating DDB Brasil’s 100th Lion at the Cannes Festival
Pegando Pesado: a fitness program in partnership with our client Cia. Athletica
Bicycle hung in front of the President’s room
Cannes Lions at our Reception Desk
DDB Brasil’s entrance hall
Meeting/Reception area, for inspirational moments and brainstorms
Campus 9: lectures on tuesday mornings with guest speakers/companies.
To keep C&A as the leader in fast fashion in Brazil, we needed more than a factoid for the next collection. We needed to find a new opportunity to set the agenda in the fashion world.
Although the conversation about fashion on the social networks is huge, it’s rarely present at the point of purchase – and is there any other moment when peer opinion matters most than when consumers are at the store deciding what they’re actually buying?
Our strategic idea was to facilitate the validation of people’s choices via social networks, bringing that dynamic into the stores.
In the process, we built a new gadget: the “Fashion Like” hanger.
Special hangers counted the likes received on Facebook in real time. You liked a piece you enjoyed on the brand page, and that like instantly showed up on its respective hanger at the store.
We used the Internet as an ingredient, rather than just a canvas, to develop a new solution. And in the end, this turned out to be more than just a contribution from creative technology and social networks to C&A; it was also a contribution from C&A to the world of creative technology and social networks.
Case
The First Will Be First
If you are not familiar with the Brazilian C&A of today, then you’re not familiar with the Brazilian C&A at all. Locally, the brand has gone through a radical change over the last years. This reinvention moved the brand away from mere clothing retailer and lifted it to a leadership position in fast fashion. This is not an overstatement: C&A today is a trend-setting brand; it commands admiration from Brazilian consumers and is an authority in style – at affordable prices. A local Top Shop. And this leadership is no small business: this is a US$ 40 billion market.
Holding on to this leadership is obviously not an easy thing. Especially with the imminent arrival of strong competitors such as Top Shop, Uniqlo and H&M. C&A needs to constantly generate buzz to keep the edge.
One of the strategies the brand has used is to launch exclusive collections partnering with celebrities (Gisele Bündchen, Fergie, Nicole Scherzinger, Beyoncé) and top fashion designers (Stella McCartney, Herchcovitch). That has been a successful formula for some years now – but it’s starting to wear out. People already expect the brand to bring a new celebrity, a new cool style, every 2 or 3 months.
Chef Ferran Adrià is quoted as having said that the single finding that turned his career around (and the course of the culinary world) was that, whereas coming up with new recipes represents a creative opportunity that is merely incremental, creating new techniques opens much wider creative paths: based on a new technique – say, spherification – thousands of new recipes can be created. In short, developing a new creative method is the most powerful way to innovate, and by extension to define what people will talk about.
That was it. C&A needed such an opportunity: more than just a solution for the next collection, the brand needed to find a new way to take part on the conversation about fashion.
Tell Us Everything!
In order to identify potential opportunities, we rolled up our sleeves and dove into the discussion about trends in fashion retail. We spoke with fashion designers, editors, journalists, bloggers and consumers.
We learned that what most sparks these people’s curiosity today is the bridge between fashion and technological innovation. This is an extensive topic, of course, ranging from new technologies in fabric manufacturing to new techniques in on-demand production and distribution.
But a specific theme stood out in our conversations: the role of social networks in fashion consumption.
Social networks’ dynamics are strongly connected to fashion consumption. Both in the “discovery” stage – when people share information, update and hone their concepts -, and in the “validation” stage – when people look for peer approval.
C&A was one of many brands already leveraging “discovery” activities on social networks, mainly through content curation, bringing style experts to help fans “find out first” and share.
As for the “validation” activities, people were mostly on their own. We found that our consumers were increasingly using social networks to get the highly regarded approval from their friends. But most of the time, people were improvising ways to do so through the informal repurposing of social networks – such as the practice of posting photos on Instagram straight from the fitting room to get friends’ feedback in real time, before the item is even bought. There were no apps or devices especially developed to help in this process, not by C&A, nor by anyone else.
Based on these findings we arrived at the strategic idea: to facilitate the validation of people’s choices via social networks, bringing that dynamic into the stores.
We saw a huge potential in this idea, as the dynamics of the social networks have quite close parallels with that of fashion retail. Per example, the value of sharing the boutique hotel you chose to spend the weekend in is similar to the value of showing off to your friends the smart new cardigan you’ve bought. This practice is highly valued by people – just look at the amount of time they dedicate to it.
C&A hearts geeks
We had yet stronger evidence that this was indeed a powerful idea when the creative director said:
“I believe this approach allows us to use the internet as an ingredient for things that exist outside of it, and today this is perceived as much cooler, fresher and more innovative than doing things that exist only within the internet itself.”
In other words, he saw the possibility of creating a new gadget, a new device that could build a bridge between social networks and physical stores.
Today, more than ever, there is a generalized, colossal infatuation with gadgets. In Brazil, their appeal reaches everyone, including consumers in the lower income ranges. This is particularly important to C&A, a brand that commands broad mass appeal.
“Brazilians lead the purchase of cellphones, HD TV, digital cameras and netbooks on a list of the top eight emerging and industrialized nations, in 2010. According to the annual research, the most striking feature was the “insatiable appetite” of emerging consumers for digital devices in comparison to more stable markets of rich nations.”
Finding Growth: The Emergence of a New Consumer Computing Paradigm
Accenture – Feb 2011
We continued our investigation and went deeper to understand which characteristics successful gadgets have in common. We found out that they are:
– Iconic: they have a striking design that is all their own.
– Specific: they perform only one task, rather than several.
– Easy to use: a key point for us, as people would have just a few seconds to understand how our gadget works.
We did not keep these learning to ourselves, obviously, but shared them with the entire team. Doing so has turned out to be very inspiring and productive.
The creative solution was simple and objective: clothes hangers connected to Facebook, with displays that show in real time the number of likes each piece already received, thus helping shoppers pick out a item to take home.
The “like hanger” was exactly the iconic, specific and easy-to-use gadget that we’d been looking for. And it arrived with a bang. Ten pieces forming a special collection, which we aptly dubbed “Fashion Like“, were shown on a tab on the brand’s Facebook fan page. Each piece had a ‘like’ button next to it. Each ‘like’ received was instantly tallied and the new total would be shown in the display of the respective hanger at C&A’s flagship store at fashionable Iguatemi Mall in São Paulo.
This solution brought the power of collectivity into the buying decision, in an unprecedented and quite powerful way. After all, the opinion of hundreds or thousands of people on a piece of clothing is a valuable input to be taken into consideration. In addition, we were using social networks to offer a real contribution to people – something far more substantive than the “like blackmail” that has plagued too many social initiatives.
At its core, “Fashion Like” simply leveraged the fundamental role of social networks: to connect people. C&A’s role was that of a mere facilitator of those connections.
C&A in the spotlight
After running for just a couple of weeks, the Fashion Like tab on Facebook had 53,674 views and the 10 pieces of the collection received a total of 7,138 likes.
C&A’s fanpage won 76,622 new fans.
Following the international buzz, C&A’s Brazilian fanpage won new fans in 20 different countries.
Source: Facebook Insights, April18 – May 5, 2012
Additionally, the initiative generated:
– 65,273 views of the introductory video.
– 7,011 mentions on Twitter, representing a potential for exposure to 8,872,606 people.
– 1,682 mentions on blogs, sites, and content aggregators.
– 1,050,000 Google search hits.
Source: Radian 6, April18 – May 5, 2012
Not to mention that half of the collection had flown off the racks in just under 24 hours.
Source: C&A
But here is the most important accomplishment:
In using the Internet as an ingredient, as a raw material, rather than just a canvas, to develop a new gadget – an object that iconically materialized the brand’s innovative spirit – we have triggered an innovative power that has relevance beyond the world of fashion. The repercussion generated by the project traveled way beyond fashion editorials and was talked about in business, communications and technology publications around the world.
In the end, this turned out to be more than just a contribution from creative technology and social networks to C&A; it was a contribution from C&A to the world of creative technology and social networks.
“I’ve always wanted to be able to paint the dawn, but in the old days one never could. It would be too dark to see the paints; or else, if you turned on a light you’d lose the subtle gathering tones of the coming sun. But with an iPhone, I just turn it on, start mixing and matching the colors, laying in the evolving scene.”
– David Hockney
Why would a 72-year-old painter change his brush for his fingers? Because the iPhone allowed David Hockney to paint something he had never been able to until then.
This story translates the best meaning of a canvas: a surface inviting people to come up with ideas.
This case is about how Telhanorte, Brazil’s largest building materials retailer, created a new (and simple) product that invited people to come up with interesting ideas for their homes. It is also about how the way people connect with the social networks helped them see these possibilities, and the importance this had to a hardly exciting category.
THE DULL PART OF A COOL PROCESS
Getting started on a new home or a new space is always an adventure surrounded by cool things.
People walk around a décor store as if they were walking around an exhibition room. They are there to shop, but that’s not what pleases them the most: shopping is the mere result of an imagination process that is triggered once they step into the store. What makes them like these stores is the fact they can get inspiration as they picture their lives in a new home, a home all their own.
The process of building a new home involves the home improvement stores, like Telhanorte. As it happens, though, in Brazil these stores are hardly perceived as inspirational. For Brazilians, the thought of home improvement stores readily conjures dull things like bricks and cement. The category cannot be said to help people picture their home ready.
It is fair to say that, for being a store operating in such building materials segment, Telhanorte is perceived by people as an interruption in the cool feeling they get from building their home.
The fact is when someone is shopping for bricks, tile grout and mortar, their goal is to take home a decent product for the best price possible so that they will end up with more money left for a nice sofa.
Whereas décor stores represent the inspiration, building materials stores represent the dull part of this equation.
ON BEING DULL AND BEING COOL.
To be fair, the category as a whole has even tried to move closer to the cooler part of this process.
The first solution the category found was to use the social networks to offer décor tips. To little effect. You cannot pretend to be cool by replicating the cool factor from another category.
Therefore, the first strategic decision we took was to pursue a new path: instead of looking outside, it made more sense to look within to find inspiration. If talking about other cool things was not helping, Telhanorte then needed to do something genuinely interesting.
This meant moving from being a reproducer — one that only replicates references, only resells products — to being a producer. A producer of inspiration.
Telhanorte could create a product all its own, one of the products it already sells, only made by Telhanorte itself.
But a cool product alone would not suffice: it had to create a feeling in people that home improvement stores usually didn’t — the fun of picturing their new home and making this new home all their own.
Our task was then to find out what triggered such feeling in people. We looked at people’s relationship with the building process, but we also went beyond that.
A CANVAS OF CEMENT AND BRICKS
Imagine someone building their home.
As this home takes shape, it reveals blank spaces that look like they’re asking to be filled. And that’s what building is about: the endless exercise of creating blank spaces and coming up with ideas to fill them.
Now let’s consider the definition of canvas that we learned from David Hockney and try to imagine the creative old man painting with his iPhone. The finding of how homes are shaped revealed to us a truth that was hidden, maybe forsaken: people’s homes are nothing more than a canvas. The entire home is a canvas.
While building materials may look dull and drab , they are actually the first version of that canvas. Building materials are the foundation for a wall, which is the foundation for the paint, which is the foundation for the color of the sofa, which is the foundation for the home décor, which is the foundation for how the owners will entertain their guests, which is the foundation for the stories they will live in that place.
The more people saw their homes as a canvas right from the start, the more they would like Telhanorte and what it does for people.
In what other contexts do people use that same perspective, apart from the building process?
A PIXEL CANVAS
Imagine someone building their Facebook wall.
People put a lot of their time into building their profile.
What are you thinking of? What do you like? Where are you? Who commented your photo? Who did you beat in Songpop? People don’t see these questions as requests for information. They actually see them as invitations to express their ideas in a new way, invitations for them to make their Facebook pages all their own.
Facebook is able to create in people the same feeling a canvas does.
If we were about to have people take interest in the dull and drab part of the home building process, we had to help them see their home walls the same way they see their Facebook walls.
A CANVAS OF TILES, FRIENDS AND MOMENTS
Establishing a genuine, concrete connection between Telhanorte and what happens on Facebook walls: this was a way to bring about the same cool feeling.
This is what led us to the strategic idea: to use Telhanorte’s expertise combined with Facebook’s logic to create a new product that helped people get inspired and make their homes all their own.
Social Wall
With a change in perspective, a cool technology and a little help from the social networks, Telhanorte turned one of its best sellers into a canvas. A thing that was ready to hold any idea people might have and were willing to hang up in their homes.
This is how the Social Wall was born. A technology to print tiles, linked with a Facebook app, which invites people to send in their own photos to be printed on a wall tile.
It works like this:
1. the user had an image that they thought would look great on a wall tile or a tile mural. This could be their friends’ faces or their children’s doodles.
2. they uploaded those photos to Facebook and the app pulled them up when the user logged on. Then all they had to do was to pick a photo and decide where it should be used.
3. Telhanorte printed the tiles and sent them to people’s homes. Each tile cost less than $5.
COOL RESULTS FOR EVERYONE
The new product allowed Telhanorte to create cool stuff for everyone.
It was cool for people: it was not the kind of product that people see and feel like buying only. It was more like the kind of product that people see and imagine all the different things they can do with it. A total of 28,000 people have already requested tiles for their Social Walls.
A cool result for a multi-brand store: Telhanorte was able to remain in its core business and, based on it, innovate and leave behind the dull and drab part of the segment.
A cool result for the agency: we developed a new product/service that became a source of income for the agency, as it had a 50% share on each tile sold.
The result of this story was a cool product at its face value, and even more so for the possibilities that it allows.
Guarana Antartica is a soft drink originally from Brazil. Its flavor radiates an energy that makes you want to share with friends. On average, Brazilians have the most friends on social networks in the whole world. They also spend the most hours per week connected to these networks. Potentializing this market, the brand developed a mobile application that can use the network of each Brazilian Facebook user to propagate brand messages. Such communication channel enabled our brand to be seen by millions of people, spending only with the application development.
Creative Execution We developed a mobile application called ‘Guarana Antarctica Ex-Lover Blocker’. With it, anyone can avoid the danger of going back to their ex-boyfriend/girlfriend. After the application is downloaded, the user registers the ex’s phone number. Every time the user tries to call the ex, a sequence of messages will try to stop the call. If the user still insists, a post will be published in his/her Facebook wall, and all his/her friends will know that this person has tried to call the ex-lover. The application is available on the brand’s Facebook Fan Page, the largest in Brazil, with over 5 million fans.
Results and Effectiveness With zero marketing cost, we have reached a potential target of over 5 million brand fans on Facebook multiplied by the number of friends each fan has.
Synopsis
Ex-Lover Blocker: the application that blocks the ex.
Antarctica Guarana is the soda for friends.
And friends’ worst enemy is the ex.
That’s why Guarana came up with an application that helps friends look out for friends.
How does it work?
1-Friends convince their broken hearted friend to install the app
2-He blocks his ex’s number
3-Selects his closest friends to keep an eye on him
4-If he tries to call his ex, the app doesn’t let him call and send an alert to his friends
5-That’s the right time to call and save him
6-If he declines and call his ex anyway, everyone on his Facebook will know how weak he is
7-If he answers and doesn’t call his ex. Mission accomplished.
Insights, Strategy and the Idea Our challenge was to market iConta, a fully unlimited, free, digital account to a group of young adults, heavy users of all digital platforms, but mostly not bank customers. iConta Itau is a current account with a service package offering unlimited transactions and to be used exclusively through the Itau 30 Horas electronic channels (internet, ATM, and phone), free from monthly charges.And how could we do that? By publishing an also unlimited ad in a digital platform. Using the iPad version of Veja magazine, we created an ad that represented iConta’s main attributes.
Creative Execution We created a practically unlimited ad with 204 pages! If a user browsed through all those pages, the system made a loop and went back to the first page. It was possible to leave from any page and return to the magazine or visit the iConta site directly. And how could the media allow for an unlimited ad? Better yet, what would be the cost of a never-ending ad? We also achieved an almost unlimited profitability, as we published ‘countless’ pages by purchasing only 1 page, conveying the product’s attributes in the platform in a highly unique, previously unseen way. In numbers… The cost of 1 page on Veja’s digital version is R$ 40,000.00. The cost of publishing 204 pages would be R$ 8,160,000.00; not considering the loop, which would push the ad’s value to infinity.
204 ADS ON THE DIGITAL VERSION OF BRAZIL’S LARGEST MAGAZINE + 1 GREAT
Idea = R$ 40,000.00.
Results and Effectiveness This action, in association with other digital activations in video, generated 4.2 million views of the campaign videos on Itau’s brand channel on YouTube and 138 thousand tweets and Brazil trending topics, and the 2nd place among worldwide trending topics. In terms of business, we were able to create interest in the account. The campaign generated 37 thousand leads for the ‘open you iConta here’ button.
Describe the brief/objective of the direct campaign. ABRA – Brazilian Academy of Art . wanted to position itself as a school or art professionals and increase its number of students. The problem is that a lot of people think that a career in art is not profitable.
Describe the creative solution to the brief/objective. Our challenge was to prove otherwise. We wanted to prove that a career in art can be profitable. We needed to show young people, who were about to choose their career, how art can add value to things.
Explain why the creative execution was relevant to the product or service. We created an exhibit where the artwork canvases were R$1 bills which were no longer in use. First we invited artists who contributed with their artistic touch. Then we gathered everyone in an itinerant exhibit where the bills were sold for a much higher price than their original value. Thus proving that art adds value to everything and it is possible to profit from it.
Describe the results in as much detail as possible. 90% of the artwork was sold.
ABRA was able to prove that investing in an art career and attending Art School is worth it.
Without a doubt ABRA established itself as a school of art professionals.
As our parent company is listed on the stock market, information about earnings is confidential. In the Brazilian market, however, there is an official measurement on the growth of agencies published by IBOPE Monitor. According to this survey, DDB Brasil went from occupying the 14th position to 7th from December 2011 to September 2012.
Over the past year, DDB Brasil strengthened its position as the most digital agency out of the agencies with the provision and creation of new services, based on Digital Business Units. An innovative action was the creation of the Center of Intelligence and Performance that gathers professionals with skills to anticipate trends in consumer behavior in the online environment, generating insights and opportunities for planning, creatives, and media. Another service offered is the monitoring of the brands’ digital image construction on social networks, with policies and guidelines to be followed, delivering detailed reports with analysis of impacts and potential influencers.
DDB Brasil also launched the Mobile department, which holds intelligence and expertise to create communication strategies on any mobile platform used by the market. The Social Network department was consolidated by winning accounts such as Suvinil, placing DDB Brasil in the Top 100 agencies that understand the most about Social Networks in the world.
Listed below are the accounts won and lost over the past year:
Accounts lost:
Elected for the second year in a row as one of the Best Companies in the country to Start a Career by Voce S/A Exame Guide (the only communication company)
Elected one of the most admired companies in the country by Carta Capital for the third year in a row
DDB Brasil was elected Most Innovative Agency by Proxxima Magazine
Winner of Renato Castelo Branco sustainability Award from ESPM – the best advertising college in Brazil – in the People’s Choice Category, with work done for the institution Velho Amigo.
Sergio Valente President and CEO of DDB Brasil was named one of five Businessmen of the year that stood out in HR by Top of Mind Estadao Award.
Sergio Valente was named one of the five CEOs of the Year by Info Exame Magazine, together with Alexandre Hohagen (Facebook); Fabio Coelho (Google); Antonio Carlos Valente (Telefonica/Vivo); Sergio Chaia (Nextel).
DDB Brasil 