Ad Of The Month

When a baby becomes a viral superstar, brands get interested. It was inevitable that 2 year old Alice Secco, the “wonder baby” whose prodigious early speech made her a lockdown sensation, would show up in an ad. So it’s no surprise to see baby Alice in the new year ad from banking brand Itau.

But deciding to latch onto a viral trend is the easy part. Making it work for your brand is a lot harder. Fashions come and go, and a hot viral property can go cold very quickly. And of course a brand has to take extra care when the Internet star they want to feature is a child – there can be no hint of exploitation or anything which might make parents watching unhappy. Finally, the viral trend has to actually fit your brand and align with what you want to say.

Itau’s team up with baby Alice dealt with all three of these problems. For the people who had forgotten who the baby was, or who never knew, Itau brought in a co-star – the highly respected veteran actress, Fernanda Montenegro, to act opposite Alice. Since the baby was famous for speaking, that’s all she had to do in the commercial – so no issues with exploitation.

As for the message, a new year ad doesn’t really need a specific one beyond good wishes. It’s a pure brand-building ad, one designed to keep Itau top of mind going into 2022 and make people feel good about the brand.

The ad achieves both of those goals. On our Test Your Ad platform it lands at a score of 4.8-Stars, a very strong result and close to the top 5-Star score. It also gets an excellent Brand Fluency result – 95% of people recognised Itau as the brand despite its logo and distinctive musical theme only showing up at the end. The idea of the ad – that it’s the baby who surprises the older woman with some wise words on life – had the desired effect, with a big audience jump in surprise and happiness at that point.

Finally, this ad caught the infant star at just the right time in her spell of fame – the ad itself went viral with 53 million views, a great bonus for the brand. All in all, this is an excellent case study of how to make an ad which successfully taps into a topical trend.