To pay homage to one of Brazil’s most respected writers, Machado de Assis, the largest TV network in Brazil was launching a mini-series based on one of his books, Dom Casmurro. Through the launch of the mini-series, we needed to build up TV Globo’s reputation with a new generation, disconnected from the television. We created a website with the book, divided into one thousand extracts. In the website, people could choose and record pieces in real time with their webcam. We enabled a large scale collective reading. At the same time, we hid one thousand DVD’s with unique scenes, in public places for people to find them and hide them again once they had seen it. In less than a month, the reading was completed. Influential admirors talked about it in public and contributed to show the new image of TV Globo.33 million viewers watched the series first episode.

The media called it the best Machado de Assis’ homage of the year.A new quality standard on Brazilian television was estabilished.Almost 106 million people were exposed to press notes related to the mini-series.Spontaneous media exposure cost was the equivalent to 6,7 million dollars in advertising.

The goals and objectives of the campaign were to engage the new generations of youngsters, make them watch the series, make them to be interested in Machado de Assis’ works and even change their perception that always related TV Globo to the mass audience. Our target was very critical of the television content, didn’t watch television very often and was up to new entertainment medias and content. We did an inspirational research among the target who wasn’t interested in the content. This was all to identify the problems in the interaction between young people and television.

We invited 50 Brazilian celebrities and opinion leaders to participate in the first online collective reading project. 33 of them embraced the idea and recorded an excerpt directly from their webcams. They started to put the website www.milcasmurros.com on focus, for people to get involved with it. The media made a big buzz of it, drawing attention on literature and the author himself.Some issues concerning how to record excerpts were faced, but we managed to solve all the doubts in real time, through Twitter and emails.At the same time, inspired on bookcrossing.com, we also placed 1000 DVDs with unreleased scenes from the mini-series in public places in the main Brazilian cities, with the instruction that after viewing it, the DVD should be left at another location. So that whoever found it could watch it and then post their opinion on the serie’s website.

33 milion viewers watched the series first episode.The media called it the best Machado de Assis’homage of the year.We estabilished a new quality standard on Brazilian television.We achieved the world’s first completed online collective reading project.Almost 106 million people were exposed to press notes related to the mini-series.The espontaneous media exposure cost was the equivalent to 6,7 million dollars in advertising.

We started searching for the target audience and engaging them where they usually were: on the internet.

The strategy was to embrace opinion leaders so as to make them believe in the project for its quality. Once they were hooked on this innovative way of interacting with literature content, they would dissemitate the idea on their blogs and websites.Having done that, a positive context on the web was set. The next step was to present this information to a great deal of people through media crossing, enabling the big audience to see massively what was being validated by opinion leaders.

The campaign was created for TV Globo, fourth largest TV network in the world and the leader for 40 years in Brazil. The channel had been losing space to younger competitors. In this context, they needed to improve their reputation among the most critical viewers. On Machado de Assis’ death anniversary that year, Globo needed to introduce literature classics to the young generation and hence, created a mini-series based on the work of Machado de Assis. But how to launch a mini-series and target viewers that are not into television? That was what challenged us to create the project.