Both the soccer culture and a sexist culture are very prevalent in Brazil. In the first one, we have passionate soccer fans, who are capable of the most aggressive actions when they see something unfair happening to their teams. With the sexist culture, what often happens is an absolute silence when a woman is assaulted. Even worse, the victim tends to be blamed for the harassment they have suffered.

Not by chance, these two behaviors are usually practiced by the same people. That’s why research shows that assaults against women increase during soccer matches. In this context, we have a particular combination to confront and expose sexism in one of the most sexist environments in Brazil.

Soccer fans are composed of a majority of straight white men between 25 and 55 years old. This demographic shares a large portion of people who take sexist actions or have sexist opinions. And through the radio, a significant portion of this audience can be reached. Taking this in consideration, there was a perfect opportunity to target this audience in a moment that they would least expect: during a soccer match.

During March, people are more aware of sexism because of the International Women’s Day. So, it is an opportunity for media channels and other companies to position themselves in favor of women. Some things that are frequently done are just posting in social media or changing a slogan during the month. Rarely something as significantly as positioning and a proactive action against sexism is seen. That was the gap observed in the communication market.

Then, it was a question of just how to choose the game and make a script with a list of suggestions of what the announcer and the commentator could say at the time the foul happened. After that, there were adjustments of when the action should be made, what kind of fouls would be ideal and how much time between the first and the second parts of the action would take place.

Usually, the social media repercussion of a soccer match radio broadcast is not so significant. In a normal match, it gets between 200 and 600 comments on Twitter. In the match that the action happened, we had almost 1,040 posts during the broadcast with the game’s chosen hashtag. That is a 1,000% increase compared to the previous match broadcasted by the radio station. And in the next day the repercussion continued with an 83% increase of social media posts mentioning the radio station.