Case Study: THE DARKER SIDE OF THE WORLD CUP
I’m Sarah.
In my day job, I run Global Neuroscience Practice
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Last September, I swapped the world of brains, behaviour and brands for a new kind of communications challenge. I took part in a project with in Recife, in the North East of Brazil. I spent a month working with a group of NGOs to find ways for communications to
help fight the human rights abuses occurring during preparation for the 2014 FIFA World Cup
When Brazil were awarded the world cup back in 2007, the decision was met with cheers and excitement the world over. One of the most passionate footballing nations was going to host the biggest, most exciting tournament in the world. Football was coming home.
But as with many big global events, hosting t World Cup has a darker side too.
Since being awarded both the World Cup and 2016 Olympics, the Brazilian government has made a big commitment to regeneration, with promises of pacification of favelas and touris friendly transport systems.
However, a large part of this regeneration ha involved ‘cleaning up’ areas around stadiums Often these stadiums are being built in very p areas, and a lot of the people living there are forcibly evicted from their homes.
As literacy and access to independent inform advice are both very limited, this often means people being ‘tricked’ into signing away their homes. By the time they realise they’ve been tricked, there’s nothing they can do to avoid b evicted.
Comitê Popular da Copa is a group of NGOs, universities and social forums, led by Habitat for Humanity. They are united by the aim of fighting for the human and housing rights of poor people in these regeneration areas, to make sure the World Cup doesn’t create a housing, health and humanitarian crisis for Brazil’s poor.
I was working alongside an experimental agency made up of a team of advertising students at a local university. Together, our job was to work with the ComitĂŞ to find a way that communications could help them meet their aims.
Plan and launch a communicatio campaign that will help secu
for all families and business forced out of their home
There are two main mechanisms that might motivate the government to change their stance:
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FIFA could impose sanctions and start punishing governments for exploitations of human rights in the name of the world cup.
Given the timings (30 days), the campaign budget (R$4000), and our number of contacts at FIFA (none), we figured we probably weren’t going to be able to influence this that much!
There are two main mechanisms that might motivate the government to change their stance:
The other route was to make the government fear that by not acting, they risked losing public support. Crucially for us, being the year that state governor Eduardo Campo hopes to run for President of Brazil, losing public votes was not something they could afford to do. So this is exactly what we set out to make them fear.
Garner widespread,
highly visible
The aim of our campaign:
support for a pressure campaign urging the government to pay fairer compensation to those it has displaced
33%
15%
28%
YES 20%
NO
12%
85%
ARE YOU AWARE THAT PEOPLE IN RECIFE ARE BEING EVICTED FROM THEIR HOMES FOR THE WORLD CUP?
2%
5%
HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT THE SITUATION?
A bit of research showed us that there were a number of jobs to be done with communications: INFORM: Raise awareness of the issues amongst the wider population ENABLE: Give people a way that they can show their support MOTIVATE: Create the desire to force a change
News and media in Brazil are largely state controlled. The chances of us being able to buy any ATL advertising space or get any PR coverage that was critical of the government were pretty much non-existent. We had to think creatively, and create our own media.
We created a campaign for people to unite behind under the banner of ‘Nós Valemos Mais’ – ‘We’re worth more’. A message to unite a city, and let the government know that when they treat any of their citizens poorly, they harm us all.
We set up digital hubs through which we could share information, demonstrate support, and get people to take simple actions to add their voices to the message
We gathered real stories from those being evicted and turned them into images that could be shared. 'Dona Josefa' is losing not only her house, but also her business. She owns a few properties in Camaragibe, from which she makes all her income. The government offered less than 10% of the value for each property.
We photographed the abandoned buildings waiting to be demolished and used these as the backdrops for our campaign
‌and we used those buildings marked for eviction near busy bus routes as a free outdoor media to graffiti our messages on to (with their owner’s permission, of course!)
We got up in the middle of the night to set up installations in popular middle class beaches and parks, to drive awareness of the evictions. And took along iPads to get people to sign up to our campaign there and then.
The installations were unusual an surprising enough that people took to sharing their own snaps and tweets
DAY 1
DAY 2
DAY 3 Within 72 hours our facebook posts had been served to 90,000 people in Recife. If nothing else, that's 90,000 people who now know what's happening that probably didn't before. (For the total sum of $44 in media spend)
Engagement with the campaign was immense, with a click-through rate and organic sharing way above that normally seen for Facebook messages. But this was just the start. WE started to build an audience for the Comité, but it was over to them to carry on growing and motivating it – long after I’d gone home. So the last part of our campaign was to create guidance and guidelines to enable the Comité to keep posting, and keep people engaged.
Whilst local NGOs and pressure groups can lobby governments from the ground up, only FIFA really have the power to enforce any standards on any great scale.
At the moment, there is nothing motivating them to do this. But if their major corporate backers started to care, there might be.
SPONSORS HAVE THE POWER TO MAKE FIFA ACT
SPONSOR BRANDS
Millward Brown works with many of the major global sponsors of FIFA and the world cup in multiple markets.
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MAJOR SPONSORS OF GLOBAL EVENTS LIKE THE WORLD CUP
Was there the opportunity to use our relationships with those clients to highlight the risks to brands with being associated with such atrocities? If brands knew of the risks to their reputations, would it encourage them to take more responsibility as sponsors of these events in future?
Once back in my day job, I ran a study looking at measuring people’s instinctive feelings towards the 2014 World Cup and the brands that sponsor it, to investigate the impact that awareness of these negative issues has on people’s opinions of sponsor brands
The data showed that by the end of the tournament, virtually everyone in Brazil was aware of issues around corruption and the expense of the tournament - and well over half had heard of forced relocations! Delays in the construction of stadiums
97%
Tickets too expensive for part of population
96%
Usage of public funds for stadiums construction
94%
Corruption
94% 90%
Political misdoings
83%
Transport system not ready for the event
61%
Forced relocations
53%
Breaches of workers’ rights Human rights abuses Ban of unauthorised merchandising
47% 36%
Awareness of issue
The government misled the population, saying they would not spend a penny of public money in the hosting of the World Cup – but they have spent billions of our money!
Even outside of Brazil, awareness of these negative issues was growing with international pressure mounting on FIFA to take more action Post-tournament
Pre-tournament
60%
Delays in the construction of stadiums
45%
Tickets too expensive for part of population
50%
44%
Corruption
35%
Political misdoings
61% 41%
44%
Transport system not ready for the event
28%
Forced relocations
39%
Human rights abuses
18%
51%
32%
41%
Breaches of workers’ rights
Ban of unauthorised merchandising
59%
31%
Usage of public funds for stadiums construction
68%
44% 41%
23%
Awareness of issue
I love the World Cup. However I feel that the body that governs the World cup is corrupt‌This World Cup has been high in tension because FIFA didn't take into account the expense of the tournament and how that would effect the very poor under belly of Brazil. I think the head of FIFA Sepp Blatter should stand down.
BRAND 1
BRAND 2
The study showed the potential negative impacts of the increasing awareness of issues like corruption and political dishonesty on people’s perceptions of the brands that link themselves to the tournament. This gave us the opportunity to talk to our clients about this risk, and what they could do to prevent these issues in future events.
The whole experience of doing a project completely surpassed all expectations. I am hugely proud of the team, the work we produced and the amount of success we managed to have in a limited timeframe on a very limited budget. It was an incredibly experience, and I want to say a huge thankyou to thank everyone who gave their time, money, ideas and enthusiasm to making it work. Particular thanks must go to Philippa and Michael at TIE, WPP for supporting the placement, and Millward Brown for letting me go – and indulging me and letting me run the project when I got back!