The idea came from observing a specific behavior of consumers of pirated content: searching for links to illegal football broadcasts.

A journey that begins with a simple media channel that is part of everyone's daily lives: search ads.

Even with a small investment budget, our campaign generated ad clicks and impressions in numbers never seen before by the brand.

An idea that went to the extremes of the target audience's consumption journey in order to not only deliver a two-hour live broadcast of a pirate match, but to definitively connect DIRECTV GO to football fans.

Consuming pirated content is part of Brazilian culture, and its growth mirrors that of internet access. The country's 33 million active consumers of illegal TV services are proof of this.

And among the main reasons for that number are the websites that broadcast football matches illegally over IPTV.

In 2021, DIRECTV GO came to Brazil to become the first 100% legal IPTV service in the country, offering both live TV and streaming content, at significantly more attractive prices, in addition to quality and safety that are infinitely better than the underground services'.

Our challenge was to connect consumers of pirated TV content, especially football fans, to the DIRECTV GO brand, driving consideration in a fun way, since our previous media efforts had focused on pay TV and broadcast TV users.

Every week, football fans flock to Google to search for illegal football broadcasts. What if we used that consumption habit to activate our brand, and turned these "pirates" into DIRECTV GO customers?

To do that, we purchased search terms used to find illegal websites, and "trolled" our users with a transmission that was, in a word, "special".

On March 15, 2022, Manchester United and Atlético de Madrid faced off in the round of sixteen of the Champions League. People who googled for "pirate" broadcasts of the game ended up finding a 100% "pirate" game between Mão Chester United and Atlético de Mandirituba.

Pirate TV consumers are mostly 25 to 44 years old; 60% are married and in classes B and C. They have high affinity with pay TV, but the internet is the medium with greatest penetration among them. This audience represents 21% of the DIRECTV GO target.

We therefore used a native behavior of this group to establish a connection to the brand, leveraging the internet as our only strategic channel.

Our idea used a medium that shows up even in the simplest tasks: Google searches. So we started our client's journey with the football audience. Thinking not only of numbers, but positioning.

More than an ad, we offered what they like best: football. A two-hour long broadcast, especially scripted to entertain and create buzz among football fans.

In addition to a long study on the behavior of digital piracy consumers, we monitored the keywords used by piracy advertisers for 30 days, and built a media plan based on those terms.

On March 15 our ads appeared on the first page of Google's search results.

When people searched, for example, "watch champions league live free" they saw one of our ads, leading to "piratvgoal.com.br" – a landing page (pirate style) that we created to broadcast our game.

In order to link our client to the match, DIRECTV GO became an advertiser on the fake game, with vignettes every 5 minutes, in addition to pop up banners (a traditional format for pirate sites).

These adds offered instant access to the original match – legally and in HD –, in addition to a 7-day free trial of DIRECTV GO.

Watch the full match at: piratematch.live

Our idea potentialized the results of a medium the client already used – search ads –, generating 300% more click-through than any other campaign by the brand.

The audience coming to the broadcast of the fake game watched 20 minutes of it, on average. That audience generated 43% more free trials of DIRECTV GO than any other campaign by the brand. All with a media investment of just US$ 3.855.

As it spread among football fans, the action was amplified exponentially, reaching over 5 million fans in 28 countries, and 96% of those impacts were organic.