Marquês em todo o lado
How a passion project turned into an instant viral and brought a Lisbon square to the four corners of the world.
Benfica is the largest, most successful, and most popular football club in Portugal. It’s “The People’s Team”.
When Benfica win, thousands of fans flock to Praça Marquês de Pombal, A.K.A “The Marquês” (Lisbon’s largest square, honoring the Marquis of Pombal), to celebrate with the team in what is arguably the biggest street party in entire Portugal.
We made it even bigger.
A bit of context
The year was 2017. Sport Lisboa e Benfica was about to conquer its 4th consecutive title.
Something they had never achieved in 113 years of history. And something no Benfica supporter would want to miss out on, including us.
But just like 6 million other Benfica fans scattered around the World, we wouldn't be able to celebrate this historic feat with the team at the iconic city square.
So we decided to bring the celebrations to us and to every supporter out there.
This was the launch video explaining the whole thing.
Subtitles coming soon (sorry about that).
The idea
We created Marquês Em Todo o Lado (Marquês Everywhere) - a simple activation idea that literally took the iconic Marquês square in Lisbon to all Benfica fans across the globe.
How? Well, we took a picture of the street sign, made it available for download, and encouraged Benfica fans to print it out and place it where they were going to celebrate the big title - turning any place in the world into a symbolic "Marquês" square.
The online video directed fans to a Facebook page, where they could download the street sign.
The Marquês street sign.
We dared fans to place the street sign at iconic locations around the world, where they could later go and celebrate the title.
And they did.
We reached over 1 million people in just a couple of days.
In fact, we're still replying to Facebook messages years after the big victory day.
An overwhelming response
The launch video immediately went viral, grabbing attention not just from the fans, but from the Portuguese media as well.
Yup, that’s us on the evening news, making our families proud.
Or at least trying not to embarrass them.
Winning Cannes Lions is cool and all, but it doesn’t come close to being featured at “A Bola” - Portugal’s most iconic sports newspaper.
In just two days, our stunt became the talk of the town.
We were on the 8 o'clock news, on national and international radio, on every sports newspaper, and on the Facebook walls of thousands of Benfica supporters around the world.
On May 13, Benfica won the unprecedented 4th consecutive title and the fans flooded our Facebook page with photos and videos of the celebration.
And then this happened…
Suddenly, the Marquês de Pombal sign was on city streets, squares, schools, mountain tops, underwater, on the Great Sphinx of Giza in Egypt (!!!), somewhere in the middle of the Amazon forest, and in many other places no street sign had been before.
The madness in numbers
With zero budget, zero media spend, and just one picture of a street sign, we managed to bring together 6 million people scattered across the globe and made them feel part of the official title celebration.
. The launch video had an organic reach of 887,5k users, + 3,8k likes, and was shared more than 4,5k times.
. The Facebook page content (videos, photos, posts) had an overall organic reach of more than 1.2 million people.
. 7.9k Facebook page followers.
. The hashtag #MarquesEmTodoOLado and the street sign became the unofficial icons of the title celebration on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.