Guaraná Antarctica is one of Brazil’s biggest soft drink brands, seen as a source of national pride. Its messaging is bold and easy-going, just like Brazilians. Every year, its competitor, Coca-Cola, dominates Christmastime, whether due to its massive budget or those iconic ads featuring Santa Claus. But in Brazil, few people were aware that St. Nick’s red suit came from an American brand’s advertising. To compete with a budget 1/15th the size of theirs, we created an idea focused on spreading the word and letting consumers know that by sharing a red-suited Santa Claus, consumers would be providing free advertising for a cash-flush foreign brand.

Most young Brazilians don’t know that Santa Claus wears a red suit because of Coca-Cola. A few days before Christmas, we put out a video in which we told the truth and sent out an alert: every time people shared images of Santa in red, they’d be giving a free ad to one of the richest brands on the planet. From then on, we set a challenge: if people retweeted, shared, or created content inspired by Guaraná Antarctica, we’d pay them for the ads. And as a result, thousands of Brazilians not only rushed to create content, but they also wiped out our funds in just 15 minutes.

The campaign focused on reaching young people on two social networks that are wildly popular in Brazil: Twitter and TikTok. Around here, Twitter is known as a funny network, the source of memes and entertaining trends. With that in mind, we tweeted out a video telling the truth about Santa’s red clothes and encouraged young people to RT. In 15 minutes, we hit our goal, using up all of the funds we’d set aside to reward people for their participation. In parallel, influencers on TikTok put out entertaining content, advertising for Guaraná with the hashtag #NatalCoisaNossa (#ChristmasIsOurThing) and inviting their followers to do the same. Given the nature of the platform, which makes it easy to edit videos, we received hundreds of posts for a total of over 10 million views of content with the campaign hashtag.

Midway through December, we put out tweets with illustrations of the first historical images of Santa Claus – in his original outfit, with no red in sight, of course. That’s how we got the conversation started with consumers, peaking on December 20th with the launch of a video telling the whole story. We chose to use Twitter as our main platform, given its usage in Brazil as the social network that boosts content to viral levels the fastest. At the same time, on TikTok, social media influencers put out entertaining content that advertised for Guaraná with the hashtag #NatalCoisaNossa (#ChristmasIsOurThing) and encouraged their young followers to do the same.

Since our funds were limited, we decided to distribute rewards through discount vouchers at www.ze.delivery. On the day of the campaign, the site saw a traffic increase on the order of 23%. While our funds ran out quickly, people kept on producing content anyway, especially on TikTok. And, most importantly, we saw hundreds of comments from consumers declaring that they’d never again let themselves be fooled by our rival’s red-suited Santa.

More than 10 million views/uses of the campaign hashtag on TikTok.

R$ 20,000 in cans distributed, which ran out in under 15 minutes.

Brazil and World Trending Topics on Twitter – beating out the world premiere of The Witcher on Netflix.