VIDEO: Worms eat through people's heads in São Paulo anti-drug advert

The Crack Consome ad at the Galeria do Rock, São Paulo

O Crack Consome is a governmental campaign which was launched earlier this year to highlight the dangers of drug use in particular crack cocaine. It used shock tactics in São Paulo by using larvae to eat through the photos of people's heads from the inside.

Filmed at the Galeria do Rock in the centro region of São Paulo, the clip below shows how live worms were made to eat through the poster ads. It's not the most pleasant sensation as you watch them being devoured and transformed into scarred and holey looking people.  But the campaign did win the ad agency Talent a Cannes Lions Prize in 2013

Crack Consumes from Malabar Filmes on Vimeo.

The pictures were actually produced by printing on to dough rather than paper to give the worms an apetite.

The new advert for São Paulo's amusement park (Hopi Hari)

Hopi Hari is a fictional country located 80km outside of São Paulo. In reality it's just a theme park, the only "residents" or "Hopius" being the amusement park employees who presumably are fluent in Hopês (Hopi Harian language). However it somewhat incredibly attracts 5 million visitors a year which is more than the Christ the Redeemer statue and Sugar Loaf mountain put together!

Inside Hopi Hari land you'll find delights such as the Klapi Klapi, the Rio Bravo, the Bili Bili as well as the Eiffel Tower ride (out of which someone actually fell and died earlier this year so you might want to think twice about this one). But the star of the show is the new Montezum which is billed as the largest rollercoaster in Latin America.

Below is its new advertising campaign aimed at getting you to confront your fears:

I thought the frightened fish was a cute metaphor for a sushi-mad Paulistano public. Well done Young and Rubicam.

SP Turismo's Viva Tudo Isso campaign

By the was this was the official video put together by Sao Paulo Tourist board under the "Viva Tudo Isso"      ("(Long) Live all of this") umbrella campaign to commemorate the city's birthday yesterday:

Viva Tudo Isso from Brenno Castro on Vimeo.

Happy birthday São Paulo

Today São Paulo is 458 years old! I never really thought about cities having birthdays until I was told that today was a day off for all Paulistanos. Since then I am very much in favour of city birthdays ;)

Just about everybody is getting in on the act and there are many bizaare activities such as collective dog walks on Avenida Paulista, the erection of temporary inflatable icebergs on city lakes, and many others but my favourite is this special edition coupon site which is offering various "bargains" priced at R$ 4,58 R$45,80 or R$458 such as these dubious chicken sticks for R$ 4,58 (2 euros):

Only 1 set of chicken sticks seem to have been sold despite this wonderful advert for the site:

International brand adaptations: Smirnoff

Caipiroska is the vodka based version of the Caipirinha. Another common substitute for the traditional but somewhat harsh cachaça is the Japanese rice spirit saque, at least in São Paulo where there is a heavy Japanese cultural influence. The resulting drink is Caipisake or Sakerinha.

But for Smirnoff the former is more interesting and it makes complete sense that they try and capitalise on the the premixed drinks market not only through Smirnoff Ice but by offering their own capiroska:

Smirnoff Caipiroska Lime and Passion Fruit Flavours

It comes in Lime, Passion Fruit and Red Berry flavours. Here's the TV ad for the Lime version:

See also International brand adaptations: Zara, Burger King and Brasilwagen

Post-It Animation: Melissa Power of Love

As a follow-up to my previous post on Melissa's 500,000 post-it façade on Oscar Freire street (link) here's an impressive animation the Melissa guys did as part of the same project:

Someone invested a lot of patience into this project..

São Paulo Knit Café advertises via knitted lamp posts

Readers of Discovering São Paulo will remember the post about painted lamp posts (link) scattered around the city. I still don’t know whether this is spontaneous creativity by a handful of individuals or whether there is a reason behind it but a few days ago I found the next level of painted lamp posts. These are knitted lamp posts. Yes, knitted. The street name for this is Yarn Bombing” (bombardeio de novelos in portuguese) or grandma grafitti (grafite da vovó in portuguese).

 

Here’s a couple of pictures of the lamp posts on Mourato Coleho 678 in Vila Madalena. 

Close up of a knitted lamp post

This tree is knitted too

In this case this is street marketing for the new Knit Café Novelaria. And before you ask what a Knit café is here are some pictures.

Knit with friends on the sofas

Choose your wool and knit away

The idea is you come in, buy some wool, order a coffee and sit down to knit with other members of the local knitting community. I don’t think I’m personally taking up knitting anytime soon but it’s a novel concept :)

International brand adaptations: Zara, Burger King and Brasilwagen

When you move to a new country it's always interesting to see how international brands adapt to the local market. I had lunch with a fellow marketeer this week and he told me that Zara (which you won't find on the high street, only in São Paulo's more upmarket and select shopping malls) had to raise prices for the Brazilian market in order to increase desirability amongst middle to high class shoppers and drive sales. It made me smile because it's the exact opposite positioning it has in its home country Spain where it is an affordable, accessible, mass market, high street retailer.

Below are some more obvious examples which I have stumbled across whilst trekking through the southern neighbourhoods Moema, Itaim and Vila Olimpia:

Burgers on the terrace: BK being meteorologically aware

Yes, I did a doubletake too.

Coca-Cola Shoes are in/back/out/here/everywhere (delete as appropriate)

Ok so I’m walking down the street and I glance into a shoestore and see some new Converses I have never seen before. Looking closer I realize they’r e not Converse, they are a different brand, a brand I know very well but don’t associate with footwear… Coca-Cola! Here are the photos I took:

 

Now being an arrogant Westerner (capital W for emphasis) I immediately assumed these were bootleg and tut tutted  - what would The Coca-Cola Company say if they found out.  Major brand infringement lawsuit coming your way Mr São Paulo Shoe Shop Owner. But no – I was wrong, these are legitimate, official Coca-Cola products. I can think of a million product areas Coca-Cola could easily move towards but I must say shoes is not high up the list although when you see it it kind of works.

After researching this I have found not only that they are readily available on many Brazilian shoe retailers such as Leader  which have fancy ones like these:

 

but they also have their own website www.cocacolashoes.com.br 

And it could be that I don't shop a lot and hadn't noticed till now but until I came to Brazil I didn't realise Coca-Cola had expanded into clothing proper so if you really feel the need you can deck out entirely in Coca-Cola clothing.

Now before you all go off and read another post in disgust, I should inform you that, according to the Coca-Cola freaks out there, there was a time in the 80s when Coca-Cola shoes got fashionable and as we all know.. the late 80s are “in again”. Need I say more, Leader awaits all you moderninhos…

And if not there's always Lou Bega to keep you sweet..

This is what 500,000 post-its look like

Melissa is Brazilian store which sells fashionable shoewear for women whose façade displays recently caught my eye. It’s flagship store is on no other street than Rua Oscar Freire in São Paulo referred to, tongue in cheek, by a friend of mine as the Beverly Hills of São Paulo and occupant of the most expensive dark blue square on the Brazilian monopoly board (on the English board it would be Mayfair). You get the idea.

And like any other store which needs to justify high prices Melissa has a strong marketing team which recently hired the agency Casa Darwin to completely paste the entire shop façade with post-it notes as co-marketing action with 3M. I am not in a position to evaluate the effectiveness of the campaign but it is certainly eye catching and not only did they do it once, they are repeating it 6 times with different designs, each post-it intended to be a single pixel in the grand display. A whopping 500,000 post-its have been used in total (don’t worry I’m sure 3M gave them a bulk discount :)) along with 40km of adhesive tape.

The address is below if you want to stop by and if not see my pictures even further below, there was a post-it elephant on view when I stopped by!

Galeria Melissa
Rua Oscar Freire, 827 - São Paulo / SP

The world's hardest hitting Anti-Smoking Adverts

As a non-smoker who has lived the last 5 years in Spain, a country which is in the world top 10 for the number of cigarettes smoked per capita as shown in this graphic, I was pleasantly surprised by how few people seemed to smoke in São Paulo and in Brazil in general. In fact on the same WHO index it is ranked 74 out of 121 countries, well below all European countries with the exception of Norway. 

However, it seems like it hasn't always been that way and even today there is relatively high tobacco consumption amongst children in some areas. Hence, the Ministry of Health's rather aggressive no-smoking campaign which I noticed in a roadside restaurant yesterday. Originally launched in 2002, the law made it obligatory for cigarette packaging to dedicate 100% of one side to health warning images. The official images were designed to shock and they did but even so in 2004 they were made more high impact and today the images displayed in shops and packacking are from a third set of images released in 2008 which are amongst the hardest hitting I have seen anywhere in the world. Let me know what you think of them:

Getting around the no-advertising law in São Paulo

If sandwich man advertising were mentioned to you, you would probably think of a nineteenth century man in a sandwichboard somewhere on the main shopping streets of Paris, London or New York. A few still exist but are a dying species due to the development of far more efficient ways to target pedestrians and drivers. In Brazil, however, the recent changes to legislation which restrict billboard, hoardings and street advertising means the sandwich people are back! 

At first I was very surprised to see so many people at roundabouts and intersections holding up signs but it seems that by exploiting the abundance of cheap unqualified labour, many companies work around the law and continue to advertise by employing people to stand on the streets and hold up their adverts. Presumably as they are not fixed (the person goes home at the end of the working day and takes the sign with them) they don´t legally count as billboards…

Below are some of the “human directionals”, to use a terrible advertising word, I have seen since I got to São Paulo two weeks ago. As you can see, sometimes they are dressed in corporate colours too: