Brazil is going through a transition in its models, wherein TV has been losing space to digital entertainment. Even with TV stations having a dominant say over content generation, Brazil is experiencing an accelerated growth of its digital social networks. Facebook has seen the largest growth (with 45m users in Brazil) and has already far surpassed its largest local competitor, which was Orkut.

Brazilians spend 23 hours online every week, and often leave Facebook and Twitter open as a secondary screen, providing a generally good-humoured ‘live coverage’ of the most relevant news. Blogs experienced intense growth in Brazil starting in 2006 and quickly became too commercial, due to a strong business exchange with the brands. As the blogs became money driven, they lost authenticity and credibility with the audience. Brazilians have been developing an ability to identify brands that have an authentic attitude, and only value brands that walk the talk.

To take the athletes’ experience to digital channels, it was apparent we needed a mechanism that required no effort from them. We found in RFID technology the solution to provide frictionless sharing. We created interactive installations in the race that sent sharing messages every time the runners went by them. The interactions generated animated GIFs, Like messages and videos on the athletes’ walls. Without requiring any effort beyond that of running, the athletes became the triggers that spread the experience to other people in real time.

This action was the most important step in a large project to renew running culture in Brazil. On social networks alone (Facebook, Twitter and blogs), the athletes’ messages impacted 2.9m people. Beyond the action’s quantitative results, the engagement results are still immeasurable. The action showed that people can stand out socially through running. This has motivated people to create more running groups, and especially to participate in the group Nike created. The group was created in July 2011 with 100 young runners; today it includes 2,764 athletes from São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, who often run in groups at parks and pass along the brand’s primary message in a natural way. The Facebook fanpage grew from 152,000 fans to 181,000 during the 3 days of the event. In the following months, it gained relevance within the running community and today already has 459,000 fans. With an audience as large as this, owned media has gained power; it has been helping launch products and decreasing the investment in paid media.