Do you know those extras that appear on action movies only to get shot by the hero? They are the least important characters in Hollywood and true symbols of the disregard for human life in the entertainment industry. But what if we used them to represent exactly the opposite? How? By transforming them into organ donors.

From that, we created The Extra Story: a TV spot that shows what would happen if the action movie extra was an organ donor, aired exactly after the scene where he dies. It’s a special commercial break seamlessly merged with the hollywood movie, a spinoff of sorts, to take cable TV spectators completely by surprise. Not only a media innovation, but also a fresh new way of creating branded content.

The implementation was through a partnership with two channels: FX (cable TV) and Record (open TV). We pitched them The Extra Story idea and they agreed to customize a commercial break during an action movie, without the usual vignette annoucing it, so that it seemed like one single piece of content seamlessly merged with the movie.

On FX, we aired a spot during the movie Hannah. And on Record, we aired another spot during the movie Fast and Furious 5. Both were single placements, although the stories were completely different. Seeing that these two channels are big in Brazil, the scale of this idea had national reach, which we needed to fully spread our organ donation awareness message.

The Extra Story was aired on two of the biggest TV channels in Brazil, FX and Record, on primetime. With two insertions, we reached:

- 1.6MM unique impacts

- 45% increase in site traffic and single visits

- 82% improvement in positive sentiment towards authorizing the donation of a diseased relative’s organs