Unibanco bank needed to communicate the launching of a new product for university students: Unibanco University Credit, a credit plan where the student pays 50% of the monthly fee and the other half is paid by the bank. To promote this product we created the story of Joe Bug, a lad who, with no money to pay for his studies, decides to raffle the Volkswagen Beetle his grandmother gave him. But before this, he had a brilliant idea. Cut the beetle in half. A way of attracting attention and obtaining more money. With no means to advertise, Joe Bug put up a blog with videos of the Beetle being sawn, and showing his friends and his life. To speed up the sales of the raffle tickets, Joe takes his half-Beetle to several universities to hand out leaflets and promote his idea: Half VW Bug for sale to pay for studies. Making good use of social medias, Joe sets up profiles on Twitter, Orkut, and uploads all the videos on YouTube.

A seeding strategy led off the crazy story of the Joe Bug character: Half VW Bug for sale to pay for studies. However, the originality of the story itself made the content spread beyond the target audience. Actions at the entrances of universities with the presence of the half-Beetle and the distribution of leaflets done by the character himself activated the second strategy: the power of word of mouth. In a short time, journalists, bloggers and opinion formers were moved by the guy’s attitude, which generated spontaneous media in different online and offline vehicles. Therewith, Joe’s blog had thousands of accesses. Everyone wanted to buy raffle numbers to help him and, consequently, win the half-Beetle. The character was invited for interviews and advertising campaigns. On the second stage of the project, when it was announced that it was a Unibanco idea, a segmented online media campaign invited the public to know more about the product on the bank’s website.

The action generated 40,000 accesses to the Joe Bug blog, 32,500 views on YouTube, reports on news portals such as Terra and IG, invitations for a feature in Fantástico (one of the highest rating shows of the biggest TV channel in Brazil), an article on Veja São Paulo magazine, and spontaneous media in several websites of renown bloggers, journalists and communicators. The estimated number of people impacted was of over 2.5 million.