CLUBE DO CRISTAS
Clube do Cristas was a free app that taught children under twelve to save, through a game rather than a lecture. Children were the point of the product, but they were never the ones installing it, so every asset had to stop a parent scrolling and convince them in a second that this was worth handing to their child. A year of always-on advertising, new video and image assets every month, all of it pointed at one number: app installs.
Clube do Cristas was a free app that taught children under twelve to save, through a game rather than a lecture. Children were the point of the product, but they were never the ones installing it, so every asset had to stop a parent scrolling and convince them in a second that this was worth handing to their child. A year of always-on advertising, new video and image assets every month, all of it pointed at one number: app installs.
Performance work settles arguments differently. Instead of deciding in advance what a parent responds to, the assets were built as A/B tests, one version made purely of graphics and the other built around photography, then run against each other to see what actually worked and where. Illustration puts the app’s own world in front of people and promises play. Photography puts a real parent and a real child in the frame and promises something closer to home. Both are reasonable bets, and the results, not opinions, decided which one ran in which context.
Performance work settles arguments differently. Instead of deciding in advance what a parent responds to, the assets were built as A/B tests, one version made purely of graphics and the other built around photography, then run against each other to see what actually worked and where. Illustration puts the app’s own world in front of people and promises play. Photography puts a real parent and a real child in the frame and promises something closer to home. Both are reasonable bets, and the results, not opinions, decided which one ran in which context.
Running for a full year brings a different problem, which is that people stop seeing what never changes. The calendar solved it. The assets moved through the seasons, cold weather early in the year, Easter, a summer set on the beach, back to school in September, with evergreen assets carrying the months in between. Each one gave the same app a new reason to appear in a feed, and a reason that already matched what was happening in the family’s own year.
Running for a full year brings a different problem, which is that people stop seeing what never changes. The calendar solved it. The assets moved through the seasons, cold weather early in the year, Easter, a summer set on the beach, back to school in September, with evergreen assets carrying the months in between. Each one gave the same app a new reason to appear in a feed, and a reason that already matched what was happening in the family’s own year.
Cristas is the reason any of this reaches a child at all. A savings account is an abstraction to a six-year-old, but a character with a name is not, and the brand’s whole language is built around him, down to saving grain by grain. Animating him across the campaign is what turned a mascot into a character: a way of moving, reacting and performing that stays the same whether he is on a beach or in a classroom, so every asset feels like the same personality showing up again rather than a logo being reused.
Cristas is the reason any of this reaches a child at all. A savings account is an abstraction to a six-year-old, but a character with a name is not, and the brand’s whole language is built around him, down to saving grain by grain. Animating him across the campaign is what turned a mascot into a character: a way of moving, reacting and performing that stays the same whether he is on a beach or in a classroom, so every asset feels like the same personality showing up again rather than a logo being reused.
A year of assets, one number to move, and a character doing most of the talking.
A year of assets, one number to move, and a character doing most of the talking.
Credits
Year: 2023
Agency: Blue Pepper
Client: Crédito Agrícola
Creative & Art Direction: Filipe Cordeiro
Copywriting: Ana Silvestre, Daniela Carneiro
Graphic Design: Filipe Cordeiro, Maria Reis, Juliana Pereira
Illustration, Motion Design & Animation: Filipe Cordeiro
Digital Advertising: Raquel Araújo
Project Management: Daniela Carneiro