Due to alcohol consumption, car accidents have risen during Carnival in Brazil, and so has the need for blood transfusions. While people are having fun, blood donations are falling by 30% in Rio de Janeiro.

Antarctica’s positioning “Coisa Boa Gera Coisa Boa” - Good Deeds Generate Good Things - has been executed with experiences focused on specific audiences. The brief asked for a solution to the tension of Rio’s Carnival. Our 2019 challenge for the street carnival in Rio de Janeiro was to create buzz for the brand. And, in the client’s vision, that could only be achieved by bringing some tension to the brand’s positioning, whether it included some surprise or a benefit/experience to the audience.

The client wanted to harness the carnival moment to bring contemporaneity and buzz to the brand, with a low cost and high potential for repercussion.

Antarctica is a beer best known in Brazil as BOA. Three letters that also represent all the blood types. So we turned blood donation wristbands into free transport passes during Carnival. Our pop-up blood donation center established a partnership with all the other centers in Rio and the volunteers received a card for free public transportation during the 7 days of Carnival fun.

The brand has stopped bringing news and surprising when we talk about experience and content for their largest audience: people from Rio de Janeiro in general, also commonly known as “cariocas”.

At the street Carnival in Rio de Janeiro, Antarctica is the main brand when it comes to OOH visibility, digital content, and the famous hats that are distributed to the public. This exposure, however helpful to make the brand grow, is no longer news to the cariocas. That is why we needed something that could surprise Rio and that was genuinely for the people.

On February 27th, 2019, we set BOA’s pop-up blood donation in the center of Rio de Janeiro and pulled together a blood donation campaign. We summoned the people from Rio through a Facebook event and some digital impulse from influencers on Instagram. The influencers posted their usual content compromising 30% of the post with a red stripe to the image which is equivalent to the drop of blood transfusion during the period. Besides BOA’s structure, people could also use partner blood banks in the city to donate blood.

With a donation action that only lasted 1 day, we broke the record of the last 13 years with a 45% increase in blood donations. We collected over 7 thousand blood bags, which can be used to save the lives of 30,000 people. Besides that, the action in Rio was published in over 50 national articles, including important media publications. And the Thank You video for the people of Rio de Janeiro was watched 570,000 times. There were over 14.3 million impressions with the “Kind-Hearted Rio” action.