What do you think about signing a contract with Neymar, the famous Brazilian football star, to be a celebrity for your big brand campaign for everything media but all the stand-ins instead of Neymar. It sounds very crazy but it has already happened.
GOL airline, the Brazilian airline, is the official airline of the Brazilian national football team. They can see an opportunity to use this asset in the 2018 world cup. They chose Neymar who has more than 92 million followers on Instagram, 62 million fans on Facebook but it’s very difficult to be recognized or distinguished because he also has contracts with almost 30 brands.
So GOL launched the campaign called
” The Neymarless sponsorship “. They spread the news that they signed a contract with Neymar with paying for 80 hours for Neymar’s time doing advertising through a lot of media such as TV ads, social, OOH, banner, live-streams, and airplane voiceovers, etc. but they surprise everyone to use stand-ins instead of Neymar because they thought that his time should not be doing ads but spent training!
Here are their outcomes
“ They got More than 3.2 million dollars (estimated) in free media and also got more than 5.4 times more mentions about the sponsorship and the campaign than all the other Neymar sponsors combined ( during the campaign period ). The airline most associated with the World Cup in Brazil. ”
In my opinion, This is the craziest advertising campaign that I’ve ever known. Spending a lot of money to hire Neymar to be their presenter but really not use him at all and can steal more attention from Brazilian people than the other sponsors combined.
Can you imagine that this campaign could reach people and got free media from various media more than use real Neymar? This is the courage of the brand that dares to be different from other competitors. If the Brazilian won the world cup this year, many people may think that the brand is involved.
Digital Marketing Les Roches 上海中国 
It’s a really good advertising campaign. Great job KP
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