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, it 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 on 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.

THE PAYBACK DINNER is the synthesis of direct communication. The dinner was a direct and vengeful contact with the marketing directors of some of Brazil´s biggest companies. After the video was launched, people were so impacted that they started sharing it over and over. The video soon became a social media sensation.

We needed to find the most disrespectful companies in Brazil, information that was provided to us by Reclame Aqui. With this, we invited 102 executives for the opening nights of new restaurants, which were obviously not real. Of these, 9 executives accepted the invitation, but only 3 of them allowed us to use their images.

The video was released on the Reclame Aqui Facebook page. Then, we waited for people to share it. And we didn’t have to wait too long.

In Brazil, everyone has been disrespected by service companies. Telecom, logistics and e-commerce are among the most disrespectful. They simply mistreat their clients, leaving them waiting for hours on the phone, unduly charging them for services and confusing them regarding their rights, rather than helping to clarify them. It’s a true nightmare.

Reclame Aqui, the country’s most important consumer protection company, did what every Brazilian would love to do: get revenge.