Revelers enjoying the party, Epa Rei. Image by Renata Acioli

“Quem não chora não mama! Segura, meu bem, a chupeta. Lugar quente é na cama. Ou então no Bola Preta” (If the baby doesn’t cry, he doesn’t get his pacifier).

The chorus of the classic samba song, written by Nelson Barbosa and Vicente Paiva, belongs to Rio’s most popular Carnival parade, Cordão do Bola Preta.

Originating in 1918, Bola Preta is an important part of Rio’s heritage and remains steeped in the region’s folk culture. The event also draws huge crowds. This year alone 2.3 million people attended, making it an enticing event for brands and marketers.

Besides Bola Preta, most of the city’s biggest parades, such as Monobloco, Empolga às 9 and Simpatia é quase amor, receive sponsorship from brands.

This year, beer brand Antarctica, in partnership with the bank Itaú and the marketing agency Dream Factory, sponsored all 485 of Rio’s Carnival parades. The Rio Times estimates that Carnival generates revenues of R$1.45 billion in Rio alone.

Carnival unbranded

Renata Correa dancing at the Bola Preta. Image by Raphael Crespo.

But branding and revenue only tell part of the story. Several smaller parades organized by young people across the country have emerged in response to the commercialization of Carnival. The focus of these parades isn’t brand appeal, but Carnival-inspired spontaneity and creativity.

Filmmaker Roberto Souza Leão is one of the organizers, though he doesn’t work alone. One of the essences of Carnival is its artistic collaboration, which means that Leão’s group, which he formed with his friends, collaborates on everything, from costumes to band rehearsals.

“We don’t have any pretension of transforming the parades into a business. This is the place and moment where we can have fun with our friends,” says Leão. “One of the requirements to join the group is to love the Carnival party.”

Carnival lovers

From 2005 to 2008, the group organized a boat parade called Se melhorar, afunda (Literally, “If it improves, it sinks”). The parade was held on a barge, which floated revelers from the nearby city of Niterói to Rio.

The event was a huge success but soon after it became famous, the organizers decided to jump ship.

Leão explained that with popularity comes commercialization, resulting in a loss of the sense of play and spontaneity that made it popular in the first place. By repeating the same parade year after year, it becomes a brand “and we don’t want it to,” says Leão.

Like many other Brazilians, Leão’s group opposes the commercialization of Carnival. “In Rio, it’s increasingly difficult to play in a parade. We need to register, to schedule a start and end time, and we’re given a designated place to perform,” he says. “It’s losing what we consider the most beautiful part of the party – the sense of spontaneity and the free celebration.”

The “O Centrão vai virar mar” party. Image by Pedro Esteban.

To maintain this sense of spontaneity and freedom, Leão’s group decided to adopt different themes for each year. After Se melhorar, afunda they organized Exalta Rei (“Glorify the King”), in honour of singer Roberto Carlos (known in Brazil as the King of Jovem Guarda music).

Given the group’s stance on brand endorsements, it should come as no surprise that they have also organized a protest against the commercialization of Rio’s Carnival in the form of another carnival party, aptly named “Êpa Rei” (“Oops, King”).

“Our generation discovered that we can ‘Carnavalizar’ (literally, “transform into Carnival”) different rhythms. The gist is this: leave home in costume, meet your friends, and play,” says Leão. “Each parade needs to be a unique experience.”

Saying no to social

Although Brazilian brands are increasingly looking to the web to spread their content, the focus of these non-commercial parades isn’t to engage people through social media – everything is still word of mouth.

“We don’t have to spread the word too much,” says Leão. We never divulge the date and time. And even when only using word of mouth, we begin with 15 people and end up with thousands.”

This year, the group adopted the theme Baianada, an expression used to honour the state of Bahia’s unique musical culture. During the parade, more than 100 participants entered Santos Dumont Airport – the second largest in Rio – where they danced and sang different Carnival songs.

Baianada playing in the Santos Dumont Airport. Image by Pedro Esteban

“We did it in a very spontaneous, funny and cheerful way, playing in a public space but respecting people and the airport infrastructure,” said Leão. “In fact, I would like to congratulate people from the airport because they understood the joke.”

Carnival is a unique celebration that brings people from all backgrounds together to revel in music and fantasy. It can be organized through social networks, take place at big venues or on the streets.

It can be funded by brands using digital and traditional ad campaigns or it can be organized independently, by people who want to wear funny costumes, meet friends, and follow the sound of the tambourines around the corner and be free.

But the country is changing and Brazil’s emerging middle class is reinventing the game for brands and marketers alike. According to estimates, 10.7 million Brazilians are set to hit the skies for the first time in 2011, 8.7 million of whom belong to the “emerging classes” C and D.

Brazil’s largest airline now faces the challenges of remaking its brand for these new travellers. As TAM’s Manoela Amaro explains, the company is leveraging social networking sites like Twitter and YouTube, establishing partnerships with lower-end brands such as retail chain Casas Bahia (which has made billions in profits by charging interest on instalment plan purchases), and creating ads with popular folk figures.

Brazil's Emerging Classes: Roughly 6 million people are expected to move from Class C to Class B in 2011

How have the so-called “emerging classes” changed the face of flying in Brazil?

We are in the midst of an economic boom in Brazil and the whole world is witnessing it. In the past, travelling by plane was basically for the richest people from “classes A and B”, who top the Brazilian consumer pyramid.

Nowadays, the base of the consumer pyramid is increasing with the economic growth of classes C and D. Thousands of people from these lower economic classes are now potential customers.

What are you doing to engage these new customers?

TAM’s strategy is to show that the company is accessible to all. That’s why we adopted the slogan: “You will go, and will go with TAM.” [Editor's note: The Portuguese slogan, meant to echo a popular cheer sung during Carnival, is almost impossible to translate into English].

We invited Brazilian pop singer Ivete Sangalo to be the spokesperson for our brand. We didn’t want an “elitist” person or a very popular one, but someone who could reach out to all classes.

She was on the cover of TAM Nas Nuvens inflight magazine and in several videos made for our channel on YouTube and our inflight TV. In September, we produced a big concert with Ivete at Madison Square Garden, in New York.

How are you using content to accommodate customers that have never flown before?

We launched the microsite Como Viajar [“How to Travel”] where people can learn everything about flights, especially the English terminology, which some customers might not know. The site’s “host” [the person who dispenses the flying advice] looks like a regular person, neither a sophisticated nor a popular one.

Both the check-in staff and flight crew are trained to help passengers who are travelling for the first time. We realize that flying is completely new to many customers and everything from ticket pricing to the inflight experience can be confusing.

We also recently launched a second portal called TAM Tips for all kinds of travellers, not necessarily those who have never travelled before. It’s still in beta but it will be a collaborative website linked in to the social networks that will offer tips and routes for tourists.

Tell us about your partnership with the low-end Brazilian home products store Casas Bahia. What does it say about TAM’s new brand?

This is part of our strategy for distribution. We can’t expect the passenger to come to the airport or one of our stores to buy a ticket. We have to be where they are.

We’re trying to challenge the perception that TAM is an airline focused only on executive customers and show that we are open for anyone who wants to fly. It goes hand in hand with the Ivete Sangalo slogan: “TAM is for everybody.”

Brazil has the highest rate of social networking activity in the world. How does this play into your engagement strategy?

We are living in the “truth” era. Customers always had the decision-making power in the service industry but this whole movement of social networking just makes it more evident.

Here at TAM, we have been using this to foster relationships and share our values with passengers. TAM is the Brazilian company with the largest number of followers on Twitter – more than 128,000. If you have a question and post it there, someone from our team will answer you in less than five minutes. We have a team dedicated to monitoring and replying to messages like a call centre that works 24 hours a day.

Twitter is a great way to listen to what people are saying about the brand in real time.  To engage further, we sell promotional tickets exclusively to these followers, what we call “Twitter fares.”

You produced a very popular interactive video campaign for last year’s World Cup in South Africa. How did that experience turn out?

We launched a website, Paixão por Torcer [“Passion for Cheering”], where we asked visitors to send inspirational messages with videos that would be watched by the Brazilian soccer team during their flight from Brazil to South Africa. The exterior of the TAM plane that transported the soccer players was painted with messages sent to the website, with the slogan: “We don’t take only the Brazilian team. We take all of Brazil.”

On the day we launched the video TAM had the most accessed branded YouTube channel in the world, and the video currently has more than 115,000 views.

Brazil has two very important world events scheduled: the Olympics in 2014, and the World Cup in 2016. What are your expectations for these events?

We are very excited. Brazil has much work to do in terms of infrastructure and we at TAM will have to be prepared for the demand that will come with these events. This is our goal for 2011.

SparksheetTV: As Brazil’s largest international airline, how does TAM present Brazil’s culture and brand to the world?

by jmm kazi via Flickr

How would you characterize the state of transmedia storytelling in Brazil?

The Brazilian market is still in its infancy. We’re really just starting to catch up in all areas of advertising and digital production, but transmedia is growing even faster than we imagined.

We have television stations investing in it. TV Globo [the largest commercial station in Latin America] has a department devoted to transmedia. Agencies are already using the term in client pitches. Big advertisers are demanding transmedia projects. So the will is big, though initiatives are still small.

The World Cup and the Olympics coming here will be very powerful platforms for transmedia storytellers. We have a great opportunity to create narratives that show the world that Brazil is about more than samba, bunda [booty] and landscapes. These global events will allow us to tell our stories and deepen the country’s brand.

What are you working on at the moment?

Elle magazine has invited us to develop the show Dirty Little Secret, which will be like an animated version of Sex and the City, with haircare brand TRESemmé as the sponsor. The series will begin on the Internet but will also have a presence in magazines and on the iPad. We even created a Brazilian character, who is voiced by a Brazilian actress. The project involves teams from the U.S. and Brazil.

A panel from "Dirty Little Secret"

You always say that it’s important for storytellers to look to the past for inspiration. In Brazil, soap operas have been the dominant form of television entertainment. What can we learn from the history of Brazilian drama?

The great authors have always wanted to tell a little bit more of their stories, but never had the platform. [Legendary screenwriter] Janete Clair was a genius. If she could have, she would have hyperlinked everything she wrote.

Monteiro Lobato [Brazil’s most influential children’s author] would have a field day with today’s technology! With transmedia storytelling, you are not locked to a little island, you’ve got this big map and people will want to explore it on the Internet, on their cellphone, at an event, or reading a newspaper or magazine. And Lobato was a major producer of worlds, a geographer of stories.

Today’s authors have the opportunity to think, “In what other ways can I speak to my audience? How am I going to engage someone who doesn’t watch TV?” In a country like ours, in which people love content, conversation, dialogue and communities, the opportunities are endless.

How do you see transmedia storytelling being applied to soap operas, and can it work for such a mass audience?

The fact is that we cannot talk to everybody anymore. There may be people who dislike a character and others who love them. Transmedia allows you to develop different parts of a story, for different audiences, on whatever platform suits it best.

A big part of transmedia culture is the idea that the audience can participate in the development of the story. Has this caught on in Brazil?

We’re not quite ready for this in Brazil. This is a discussion that we will have to take very seriously, because it involves issues of copyright, of participation, of the limits of authorship. But the discussion is very good and necessary.

One of our goals is to educate the Brazilian market on fan culture, which is still a very new concept in Brazil. And of course, social networks are key to fostering participation and strengthening the audience’s relationship to content.

Do you think this participatory model can work for Brazilian soap operas?

I still think the author is king. Indeed, we must develop platforms for both the author and audience to listen to one another. But most user-generated content isn’t very good and ultimately, it’s the author who has the ability to create stories.

Characters from Monteiro Lobato's children's books (left) and a still from the Janete Clair soap opera "Irmãos Coragem"

Before the Alchemists, you worked in branded entertainment and advertising with such clients as Danone, Unilever, Nokia and several important Brazilian brands. What kind of return on investment should companies expect if they decide to venture into transmedia storytelling?

None. We have to take risks and manage expectations. The next discussion we’re going to have with MIT’s Convergence Culture Consortium is about metrics in the transmedia world.

How do we measure the success of a transmedia campaign? The key is understanding what is tangible ROI: money, media return – and what is intangible: brand value and dialogue with consumers.

Branded content is no longer a trend. Content is the future for brands and they need to invest in it heavily, whether that means appropriating pre-existing content or creating their own.

What can the world learn from the Brazilian people?

We’re a very open culture. We’re not afraid of using technology to communicate with each other and the world. Other cultures speak a lot but share very little. Sharing is different from speaking. Brazilian culture already has a very powerful conversation going on and this can be a major differential for us.

by WayneKLin via Flickr

Jenkins is the Provost’s Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California and the author of Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide.

Trans·me·di·a – 1. A storytelling process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience. Ideally, each medium makes it own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story.

What have you discovered about Brazil’s media culture? What opportunities do transmedia storytellers have in this part of the world?

The sky is the limit in Brazil. I’m still learning a lot about the media culture here, but what I’m seeing is a culture that preserves its traditions in a way that’s very much alive and vibrant.

What we’ve discovered is that digital culture represents the applying of a folk culture tradition to new media content. In Brazil, the folk culture has always been participatory. It’s always had a strong sense of remixing. It’s always included the audience as part of the performance, whether we’re thinking of the samba schools or carnival.

So if we apply that carnival spirit to thinking about media content, then I think something remarkable is going to come out of this. What I see in Brazil is a country on the threshold of global attention. Between the World Cup (in 2014) and the Olympics (in 2016), people are going to be paying attention.

That creates a unique opportunity for Brazilian companies to become international content producers, to model alternative ways of connecting the producers to the consumers and to experiment with transmedia storytelling, which I think represents the wave of the future where media content is concerned.

2. Transmedia storytelling reflects the economics of media consolidation or what industry observers call “synergy.” A media conglomerate has an incentive to spread its brand or expand its franchises across as many different media platforms as possible.

What role will social media play in supporting transmedia storytelling?

Well, I think social media is the key to what I call “spreadable media.” Spreadable media is media that gets passed along as gifts from one member of the community to another. And social networks play a really huge role in that.

Research in the United States is showing two things. First, social media is making people return to watching television in real time. Because otherwise it gets spoiled through their Twitter accounts. There are certain shows they want to watch and tweet about as they are watching [them] and that’s creating a return to a kind of event-based television.

The second thing we’re seeing is that Twitter may be the best indicator of how well a movie opens. Not just because it allows us to see the buzz, or the conversations that people are having about a movie, but it also amplifies those conversations and allows people to discover new movies and discuss them among themselves. It makes word of mouth much more powerful than it’s been before.

In that world, the fan or the consumer plays a crucial role in shaping the circulation of media content. And so companies need to know the fan, respond to the fan, build a relationship with the fan in a very different way than they’ve done before.

3. Most often, transmedia stories are based not on individual characters or specific plots but rather complex fictional worlds which can sustain multiple interrelated characters and their stories. This process of world-building encourages an encyclopedic impulse in both readers and writers.

Does transmedia spell the end of television as we know it?

Television is exploding across every media platform. It’s broadcast but it’s also on the Web, it’s on the mobile phone, and that’s part of the opportunity in transmedia entertainment.

Pieces of the story can be scattered across media platforms and that creates incentives for us to return to that content again and again, creating multiple touchpoints for brands but also creating an expanded canvas for storytellers to work on. The story is not tied to one platform. It is in all media.

The more open your system is, the more opportunities there are both for storytellers to expand their reach and for the audience to play a more active role in shaping the content.

4. Transmedia storytelling practices may expand the potential market for a property by creating different points of entry for different audience segments. For example, Marvel produces comic books which tell the Spider-man story in ways that they think will be particularly attractive to female readers (a romance comic, Mary Jane Loves Spiderman).

In Brazil, we have soap operas that run for as little as six or eight months. Is there an opportunity here for transmedia producers to extend the series beyond its television lifespan?

I’ve always felt that countries that have fixed durations for television shows have certain advantages for storytellers. We saw in the States that when the Lost producers discovered they could end the series after five seasons, that gave them a structure and rhythm that they could build on.

The result is a richer and more interesting program than one that has to be infinitely treading water because it doesn’t know how long the story is going to be. Once you’ve got that then you can build the story out in a variety of ways.

Star Wars has a fixed duration, six films, yet through games, comics and novels, there are more and more elements to the story. We’ve gone back in time to the old republic and discovered and explored different areas of that world.

And so you can build on that established base and extend it in transmedia ways that allow artists to continue to capitalize on a story that’s caught the imagination of the public.

5. Ideally, each individual episode must be accessible on its own terms even as it makes a unique contribution to the narrative system as a whole. Transmedia producers have found it difficult to achieve the delicate balance between creating stories which make sense to first time viewers and building in elements which enhance the experience of people reading across multiple media.

Any final words of wisdom for aspiring storytellers in Brazil and beyond?

I think creative people should be rejoicing in the fact that we’re living in a period
of enormous innovation, a highly generative period in which the definition of a story is changing.

It’s going to change inevitably for economic reasons, as stories travel across every media channel. But it is up to the artist to seize the creative potential of that, to create from that something that is new, that is fresh, that is meaningful and that enriches the culture.

And I think that is the challenge that artists face in the 21st century.

Transmedia definition adapted from Jenkins’ Transmedia Storytelling 101.

Henry Jenkins at TED

Brazil has the highest percentage of social media users in the world. By the end of last year, more than 67 million Brazilians – that’s 35 percent of the population – had access to the Internet, according to Nielsen. Of these wired Brazilians, 38 million spent an average of 71 hours a week on the Web, and 80 percent visited blogs or social networks such as Google’s Orkut, Brazil’s answer to Facebook.

Buying a house? There’s an app for that

These numbers are extremely enticing to companies who invested R$1.3-billion (more than US$700-billion) in the Web last year. Tecnisa was the first construction company in Brazil to do business over the Internet and the first in the world to sell an apartment – worth R$500,000 – via Twitter.

With 35% of its sales originating online, the company has already closed 38 deals through Twitter, where they have 6,000 followers, and two deals through their iPhone application in the last year. One customer took just four days to buy an apartment through the app.

Tecnisa has a long-standing relationship with the Internet; in 2005, it was the first Brazilian company to launch a corporate blog. Romeo Busarello, the company’s Internet director, says the Web is about building relationships as well as ROI.

“The Internet is not the end, but the channel for us,” Busarello said. “The social networks help us with brand monitoring, competitive intelligence, public relations and customer care. We engage with neighbours, stockholders and bloggers.”

Free delivery in 140 Characters or less

Engagement was also the goal of Pizza Hut of Rio Grande do Sul, which received more than 80 suggestions for new pizza combinations on Twitter during a recent promotion.

The five best recipes were put to a vote on the franchise’s website. The winner – a combination of beef, pork, cheese, oregano and barbecue sauce – garnered 1,746 votes and was added to the menu as the “Twitter Pizza.”

Fun with magazines

Like their counterparts around the world, Brazilian media brands are also striving to reinvent themselves online.

Ediouro, publisher of the crossword puzzle and hobby magazine Coquetel, transformed its website into an interactive gaming portal. The new site gets 2 million visits per month, has led to increased magazine subscriptions and, most importantly, refreshed the brand’s image.

“Crossword puzzles are victims of the digital age, of the mobile phone and the absence of free time,” said Robert Cassano, the strategy director for Frog Agency, which spearheaded the Coquetel rebranding. “For print media, digitalization is both the death and the salvation.”

The lesson here is that brands ought to offer customers a space to connect with each other and communicate with the brand. That’s why the new world is about return on engagement, not just return on investment.

“Social networking involves understanding the consumer broadly, talking to them individually, and mobilizing those brand advocates,” Cassano said.

Facebook of Brands

These days, 70 percent of Brazilians use Orkut to interact with brands and each other. But a group of local executives is trying to empower consumers with a new website called Drimio, which is the first social network focused exclusively on the customer-brand relationship.

Marketing specialist, Gil Giardelli, says that Orkut used to be a space for consumers to create communities and publish their opinions about brands. But then the brands themselves started using it to publicize their services and silence critics.

“Most companies use social media to publish content, recruit brand advocates and then start selling,” Giardelli said. “But the first step is to practise radical transparency, in which all decision making is carried out publicly.”

Drimio allows members to follow companies, publish information about them and share their brand experiences with other customers. Drimio puts customers back in the driver’s seat.

Meanwhile, at Pizza Hut, here comes one more Twitter Pizza for someone wrapped up in a crossword puzzle or checking out a new apartment – all on the Web, of course!