Situation

Even though Clear really wished to take part in the conversation around the world’s biggest soccer event, with one of the world’s most passionate fans, there was a major problem – the brand wasn’t an official sponsor neither of the 2022 FIFA World Cup nor the Brazilian National Soccer team (not even the Portuguese team, where Cristiano Ronaldo would play).

Brief:

How to hack the world cup without to be sued?

Objectives:

How to interact with world cup audience, withou Being a official sponsor, not being able to openly mention or make references to the event, its mascots, participating teams, their athletes and not even their uniforms? And, “Ambush marketing” tactics were strictly forbidden by FIFA and threatened with legal sanctions

The our product´s audience (men) loves football. We design something for them: football players, superstition, music and goals!

In 2002 Brazil was world champion with the striker R9, Ronaldo, "thanks to a lucky haircut", which scared the zica of the Brazilian team.

Exactly 20 years later, 2022, we invite another R9, Richarlisson, to give Zica a lucky haircut. We created the Antizica Haircut.

And Brazil talked about the World Cup, but also talked about this haircut.

For the 2022 FIFA World Cup we decided to create a new lucky haircut with a “twist”, empowered by an ingredient locally renowned for its “anti-zica” properties, the “Arruda”.

- In 2002 Brazil was world champion with the striker R9, Ronaldo, "thanks to a lucky haircut", which scared the zica of the Brazilian team.

Exactly 20 years later, 2022, we invite another R9, Richarlisson, to give Zica a lucky haircut. We created the Antizica Haircut.

- #ClearAntizica

- Target Audience: Men (15 - 55)

- Starts in Instagram, go to Newspaper, TVShows, other social networks like Facebook, and Tik Tok

To kick-off this story, we needed a powerful and relevant name as the face of our campaign, and that’s when Richarlison came in - an ascending Brazilian player, who was playing in the UK for the Tottenham Hotspur F.C., famous not only for his performance and charisma in the field, which granted him the nickname “The Pidgeon” (because of his iconic “pidgeon celebration dance”), but also for his support to social causes in Brazil. Besides that, he was considered one of the top candidates for the Brazilian National Team draft, specifically for the symbolic number 9 uniform, turning him into a possible “new R9”.

We hired Richarlison and, 2 days before the official draft was announced. And we launched the lucky haircut, the Antizica Haircut.

- We lauched this on instagram and Tik Tok.

- This turn on viral in news, world cup transmition, sites, other social networks, etc.

On day 1, the country’s media shared Richarlison’s new “Antizica Haircut” on their front pages, hundreds of fans and even influencers like Igor Coelho, the host of one of Brazil’s top podcasts, spontaneously shared his Arruda haircut online.

Clear’s reveal was well received and the Tiktok video where Richarlison did his iconic “pidgeon dance”, alongside Clear’s Pidgeon, reached more than 10 million views in less than 24 hours, and organic searches for the brand raised by more than 322% in the first week.

More haircuts started to appear in the streets, fan arts displaying Richarlison wearing it popped everywhere on the web, our Pidgeon music went viral, and even a graffiti mural appeared at “Beco do Batman”, a famous iconic location in Sao Paulo. That’s the moment we realized we hadn’t just hacked the World Cup, we’ve hacked Brazilian culture, and turned Clear into more than an “antidandruff” reference, but an “antizica” symbol!

Overall, in only 3 weeks the campaign managed to achieve:

-More than 103 million impressions (Tiktok, Instagram and Twitter), almost 200 mentions in news portals (locally and internationally) and the hashtag #ClearAntizica had more than 123 million views on Tiktok.

-In terms of social interactions, we were able to achieve more than 2,8 million, with thousands of #ClearAntizica haircuts shared, and almost 2000 videos produced by fans on Tiktok, becoming the 2nd biggest campaign in UL brazil, and the 1st of B&W (number of videos shared by users in the #).