Bola Sociology Design

To celebrate the centenary of the death of one of Brazil’s most famous and respected writers, Machado de Assis, the country’s biggest television network, Rede Globo, created a mini series inspired by the book Dom Casmurro, one of his most brilliant books.

The series, entitled Capitu, targeted an audience that traditionally does not watch television, to promote the show and start a conversation with an younger audience, Rede Globo called LiveAD, a company that focuses in innovation in communication and is part of the Box 1824 group, who then created, developed and produced a very special project called One Thousand Casmurros.

The project is a mixture of collective reading with an online social network. The book was divided in one thousand parts and a website was setup to allow people to choose and record (through the use of a webcam) themselves reading that part of the story. Important figures in brazilian media were them invited to contribute to the project to stimulate internet users to take part in the project.

In about a month the reading was completed, generating one of the first and most incredible collective readings in the internet. The repercussion and spontaneous media attention was worth the equivalent of 6,67 million of US dollars and around 106 million people read about the mini series and the project with the press coverage that followed the initiative. One Thousand Casmurros was considered to be the best tribute to the centenary of Machado de Assis and the action has just won a Gold Lion in Cannes in the new category of Public Relations. To understand better the project, take a look at the video case that was awarded the prize.