Palermo

Concept

A cigarette brand in 2010 had a very concrete problem: almost everything it can say is banned or regulated, and the health warning sits at the bottom of every piece. You cannot talk about the product. So you have to talk about something else — and for this brand, that something else was young Paraguayan urban culture: music, graffiti, the street corner, the night. That is the thread linking the four campaigns, and what makes the set worth showing as a case: the same brand solving the same problem four times in four different languages.

"Demostrá tu música 2.0" is the most ambitious and the one that looks least like advertising: a battle of the bands with open entry. 53 bands signed up, each uploaded a demo, the public listened and one won. The interface is a CD case that opens: on the left the list of bands with a play button each, on the right the disc spinning with a full player. For a Paraguayan band with no label and no money, that was, literally, a place to be heard. There a brand stops sponsoring culture and starts producing it.

The other three build separate worlds: "Salí de lo cuadrado" is absolute black with the packs spinning among trails of light; the urban version swaps the black for a wall of peeling render with the menu hung from plumbing pipes; and "Somos NIP" is a street at night with an open kiosk where the whole site happens inside the scene. Four complete visual systems with nothing in common but the logo — and the Ministry of Public Health warning at the foot of every screen, as required. It is the client that most often made me start from scratch.