Miles for the People
Reclame Aqui
Issue 53 | December 2019
Agency
Grey Brazil
Creative Team
Chief Creative Officer: Adriano Matos Executive Creative Director: Bruno Brux Creative Director: Marcelo Bruzzesi Art Director: Augusto "Jesus" Correia Copywriter: Pedro Rosas Chief Creative Officer Latam: Diego Medvedocky Creative Chairman: Per Pedersen
Production Team
Project Director: Nathália Beividas RTV Production: Renata Ruas, Izabel Soares Production Companies: RTV, Astronautas Filmes
Date
2019
Background
Every week, almost every one of Brazil’s 600 Congressmen and women travel from their home cities to the capital, Brasilia, and back. Almost 5,000 trips a month, costing $15 million a year.
Surely, if the tickets were paid for by the people then the air miles they accrue should belong to the people too? While many thousands of Brazilians can’t afford to fly, their politicians accumulate 28 million air miles a year.
Reclame Aqui set about getting Congress to return their air miles.
Idea
Every elected official’s flight expenses were tracked and converted into air miles.
These numbers were published on Reclame Aqui’s mobile platform, where citizens were asked what they would use the air miles to do? Take a sick child to a hospital overseas? Congress members were asked politely to return the people's miles. None did. In social media, they came in for a lot of criticism.
The subject spread like wildfire. It hit the headlines of primetime news. Over 30 politicians published on social media that they would return their miles. Two congresswomen introduced a bill to the National Congress.
Results
The law now ensures that airline miles accumulated with public money will revert back for the people to use.
In two months, 23 flights have been flown by ordinary citizens.
260 million people were reached by a campaign worth US$138 million in earned media.
Our Thoughts
Reclame Aqui has been holding to account companies that rip off their customers or simply won’t respond to complaints since 2001. But it also allows those companies to justify themselves. It is an open but impartial forum that promotes responsible consumerism.
From challenging the big mobile operators to behave more honestly (see ‘The Art of Waiting’, Directory 36) the organisation has moved on to take a long hard look at corruption in high places (see ‘The Colour of Corruption’, Directory 44).
This campaign here is a clever ad for Reclame Aqui itself, which I notice has an annual income of around $10 million from the services it offers.