Guaraná has sponsored both of Brazil's national football teams since 2001. Despite having done a number of ads with the male players, the brand had never highlighted the women's team in its campaigns. A clear symptom of the inequality in investments in the sport in Brazil – a country that's supposed to be the land of football. Since the Brazilian team will be playing the FIFA Women's World Cup in 2019, the brand decided to finally create an ad with the women's team, even though this is one of the worst years yet for the Brazilian squad, coming off 9 consecutive losses. After all, women's football deserves more publicity.

In this dire scenario, just creating an ad wouldn’t be enough to bring about real change. So Guaraná started a movement to empower women’s football. To do that, the brand had to develop something entirely different. Instead of ads aimed at the final consumer, it worked up an ad that, while it was aired in the mass media, really targeted brands and marketing executives. The ad invited more brands to make ads with the stars of the Brazilian women’s squad. After all, it’s a World Cup year, and for the men’s World Cup, dozens of brands had come up with major campaigns featuring the male players.

Despite sponsoring the Brazilian Football Confederation, which includes both men’s and women’s teams, Guaraná Antarctica had never done a single ad, not even a post, about the female stars. So we couldn’t just start making ads. First, we had to apologize for our neglect of them. Only then could we start encouraging brands to feature the women’s national team in ads and help promote the sport. Even a simple invitation seemed like too little, so we decided to make it easier for brands to use the athletes by creating a whole image bank with the women’s team posing for generic products. Any brand could buy an image from the bank via a simple payment: a fee for the athletes and a donation to an NGO that promotes women’s football.

We made an ad featuring three different players from the Brazilian women’s team. First we apologized for never having used them in advertising, despite having used male players, and then invited brands to follow our example. After that, we created an image bank on our Instagram. There, brands could find the stars of our ad posing for different products. The provocative tone of the communication was designed to make people start demanding more ads with more girls. And that’s just what they did.

More than 10 big brands have bought over 20 pictures from our image bank so far, raising more than R$400K for the players and the NGO. The commercials were heavily posted by Brazilian female athletes and the sports media. Most importantly of all, the movement caught on and brands started to respond by hiring other female players to star in their ads –6-time best player in the world Marta, who signed a deal with Brazil’s biggest beer brand.