The Challenge
Sertanejo is the most popular music genre in Brazil, and Brahma beer has sponsored it for over 40 years. It’s a huge platform for us. Every year, we look for new ways to connect with the sertanejo community and improve awareness, brand preference, and consideration. When creating this year’s campaign, we saw an opportunity to connect with our target audience by addressing one of the main subjects in sertanejo lyrics—something that brands usually don’t have the courage to touch: the pain of being cheated on. We realized that sertanejo singers make millions of reais singing about their cheating stories, while regular people, when cheated on, get nothing but suffering. It feels so humiliating that fewer than 1% of Brazilians admit to ever being cheated on, according to research. So we thought: what if Brahma could help those poor, anonymous, heartbroken souls enjoy the good part of being cheated on too?
The Solution
We started by asking everyone who’d been cheated on to share their stories. They could write about what happened, send screenshots of the moment they found out, or even of how they told a friend about it. We selected the best, funniest ones and, with a little help from AI, turned them into sertanejo songs. But not regular ones: all lyrics were the exact texts people sent us — with no rhymes, no musical structure. Just texts and conversations, 100% transcribed. Once the songs were produced, we designed a cover for each and released them on Spotify, with all rights reserved for the authors. Every stream turned directly into royalties for them. So they did what every artist does: promoted their songs — and, in doing so, promoted Brahma and the campaign. Brahma also used its media power to promote the songs, helping the composers get richer and more famous.
