Fact: TV Piracy is part of Brazilian culture. 33 million people consume pirated content in Brazil and they don’t even feel they are committing a crime. This is a serious problem for DIRECTV GO, the first 100% legal IPTV in the country.

This case demonstrates the power of understanding the way of thinking and behaving of the pirate audience as this was crucial to outsmart them. This deep understanding helped make our campaign an open and fun discussion that would change the way people think about pirated content.

Despite a fast-changing market in the past years, one player remained constant during streaming and cable wars: the pirate TV providers. This global issue has a special impact in our country in 2021, Brazil reached the milestone of 500 million monthly unlicensed streams and downloads, with the national sport football proving to be one of the most popular to stream.

This illegal activity has been targeted for years in extensive private and public efforts of every sort. In this context, DIRECTV GO arrived in 2021 with a positioning of being the first legal IPTV in Brazil, we saw this as a great opportunity to address the issue engaging in a different way, with behavior that is useful, relevant, and entertaining.

Our brief was to shine a spotlight on piracy and encourage trial by beating the pirates at their own game, presenting DIRECTV GO as the risk-free affordable TV entertainment option.

DIRECTV GO was all about getting people to know their name and trial the product, so a clear impact to the audience and market was to be made. We also understood we had a good offer to continue the conversation — Social Listening research showed that the innovative DIRECTV GO product had a special appeal to pirate entertainment consumers.

With a new brand and innovative product, we intended to spark conversations around the brand, get closer to football fans – a big market for us – and position ourselves in the culture. So the challenge was really how we would penetrate such an established market in order to present our product to consumers in a fresh way.

The desired outcome was to reach organically as many football fans as possible in an innovative way, that would establish the personality and tone of the brand.

Research estimates that 8,4% of Brazilian piracy consumers are from upper classes, which shows the issue goes beyond affordability. We understood we should deliver more than just an awareness message, giving relevant entertainment for clients and being part of the very specific language of Brazilian football fans.

The timing for the communication was understood as crucial since we had a specific audience to catch rather than speaking broadly to people unconnected to the issue. As with other illegal activities, piracy has its own rituals. Knowing that, we made efforts to dive into the piracy user journey to define where we could be most relevant with our message.

We found that every big football match starts on Google when fans go hunting for illegal IPTV links. This is the perfect moment for our campaign. To prompt reconsideration and trial we needed to infiltrate the pirates’ world and go where piracy happens.

On March 15, 2022, Manchester United and Atlético de Madrid faced each other for the Champions League. But whoever went to Google looking for pirate broadcasts of this game ended up finding exactly that: a site with a 90-minute 100% pirated game: pirate judge, teams, athletes, announcers and, of course, pirate football. This was an effort to ground the message and provide quality entertainment. The stream also had unusual events every five minutes that gave a comic fresh vibe to it, like the narrator having snacks during transmission.

To ensure our pirates would access our link in the moment of need we advertised it on Google search, buying keywords like ”live football free” and amplified this on social.

Throughout the stream, we activated DIRECTV GO messages inviting users to get to know the brand and watch real matches in full quality, without all the unexpected problems and, of course, legally.

Culture: The campaign had an amazing reach impacting more than 5 million fans of football with 96% of these impacts being organic.

Brand: The idea that started with search ads generated 300% more clicks than any other campaigns of the brand in Champions League matches. We had great average user stay time of 19 minutes in the two-hour stream – significant engagement.

Business: The match day generated 43% more free trials on the platform compared to previous best performing Champions League matches search campaigns.

Piracy is an old foe to the entertainment business. Throughout the years substantial efforts were made to counter the growing issue in Brazil, from awareness campaigns to stricter regulations, making harsh counter-piracy actions also an element of our culture, although ineffective.

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In this context, the DIRECTV GO offer is disruptive itself, since it gives an affordable solution that combines streaming and live TV — a significant transformation for a series of underserved consumers that often turn to piracy or deal with two different companies to access movies and live football games, for example.

?With this in mind we saw an opportunity to disrupt the market and reframe piracy as a path to growth instead of a threat. For that we used very specific codes from the piracy world to further distance ourselves from traditional institutional communication when in relation to this issue, we opted for acid humor and relevant entertainment.