Panini Publications: #BruMar Scores a World Cup Record for Panini

Italian-based Panini Brasil Ltda needed to generate strong sales in Brazil for its 2018 FIFA World Cup Championship album. But with the World Cup moving from Brazil to Russia in 2018, and Brazil’s star player injured and in doubt, local enthusiasm in buying the collectible album and completing it with player stickers from all of the World Cup teams was waning. With no media budget and no official World Cup sponsorships or player endorsements to leverage, Panini turned to Ketchum for a solution. Our team hatched a clever plan to seize the national social and news media spotlight by organically engaging Brazil’s hottest on-again/off-again celebrity couple, “BruMar” (actress Bruna Marquezine and star player Neymar, Jr.), for the cost of a single courier. Our idea was to deliver a brand new official Panini album for collecting to Bruna, but to play a little trick. Upon opening the album, Bruna discovered some “starter” player sticker packs that had been created exclusively for her — containing ONLY stickers of her boyfriend Neymar, Jr.  She immediately took the bait and took to Instagram to post about Panini’s prank, and then ingeniously convinced boyfriend Neymar to autograph all of his player stickers (making them extremely valuable for trading). Then through a series of Instagram posts, she began a trading frenzy on social media — awakening sports collectors and single-handedly driving record sales of Panini albums and sticker packs in Brazil.