Finalist 2019: Sociedade Esportiva Palmeiras – “Missing Escorts”

Objective and Context:

One of the most beautiful moments in football is when the children who are the teams’ mascots walk onto the field holding hands with their idols. The most accepted origin of it goes back to the 1970’s in regional tournaments in Latin America. Beautiful.
But Palmeiras broke this decades long tradition in order to call attention to an urgent cause: missing kids.

Creative Process:

Our idea was to deliver a special activation for Children’s Day, that happens in Brazil every October 12th with a special challenge: to position Palmeiras as a team who supports social causes.
So, we decided to explore a content idea called “Family Palmeiras” to help find missing children.

It’s hard to talk about missing children. Actually, it’s hard to even think about it. But there’s one key truth specialists agree on: the more people who see a missing child’s picture, the better chances of finding him or her.
We thought we needed a really big stunt. We needed to put these missing children’s pictures in a place where millions of people could see it. Then came the idea of the missing mascots for a football game: for the first time Palmeiras’ players didn’t arrive with kid at their side.

Instead, they arrived with mothers of missing children. The goal was to generate conversations and engagement with the Palmeiras fan base and the crowd at the stadium.

Publication and Distribution:

Our strategy consisted of using the power and reach of the sports broadcasters on TV and the internet as a first group to support the NGO “Mothers of Sé” that helps families who are searching for their missing children. And since we broke the formality in the pre-game mascot
ritual, the sports media covered our initiative.

In order to strengthen and amplify the message under the #FamíliaPalmeiras campaign (“#FamilyPalmeiras”), we hired a digital influencer (@luanamaluf, 235K followers) to cover the event with a “takeover” on the team’s digital channels. We also posted about the action on our timeline, creating greater engagement and extending the life of the campaign – effectively creating a movement among the fans to help find these children.

Effect:

The impact of the activation went beyond the sports broadcast. In addition to articles in newspapers and magazines, the campaign went much farther on social media. With zero media or production budget, we reached 55 million people, earned 151 million impressions and gained 11,000 new fans on Palmeiras’ social channels.

It is an innovative campaign, comprising pieces of high-quality content, through which the goals were achieved. In this way, Racing Club solidified itself as a club with a creative imprint in its campaigns.

Links:

Case study: https://vimeo.com/377849040