We invited executives from companies with the worst customer service reputations in Brazil to a restaurant’s opening night. Then we served them as badly as their companies serve customers. At the end of the dinner, instead of the bill, they received a load of complaints along with a message: “Did you feel disrespected? Thousands of your company’s customers feel just like you.”

To get revenge, we trained a group of actors portraying servers to mistreat the executives, leaving them waiting, serving them cold food, charging them unduly for food that they weren’t served, giving them evasive answers; treating them exactly the way their companies treat their clients.

We prepared fake restaurants with hidden cameras and microphones. So, there was enough to choose from the executives’ most irritated reactions to make the video most appealing to our public. In just a few minutes, our success was evident.

The video campaign broke the internet.

In only three days, the video had more than 8 millions views, 270K likes, 340K shares and 30K comments on social media. 63% increase in traffic to the website. 180K new followers on the Facebook fanpage. US$ 9 million in earned media. All the most important media of the country, like the magazines and newspapers Veja, Exame, Folha, Estadão and Globo, covered the PayBack dinner. More than 50 million people were impacted.

Low Budget

We had an overall budget of R$ 120.000,00 (about US$30.000,00), enough to build the fake restaurant and to film the action.