In light of that decision, let's look at at past nudity on Brazilian TV. It's never been absent, as documentaries with Brazilian Indians, who don't wear clothes, have always been acceptable, so much so that the popular children's TV series Castelo Ra-Tim-Bum included two boys enacting Indian legends, dressed in only their skins.
But the best example in not in the programming, but the commercials. Two of the most remembered Brazilian television commercials of all time were the Mila Margarine commercials in which a couple of dozen nudist children highlighted Mila's "natural" qualities. Juvenal Azevedo, one of the creators of the ads, posted a remembrance of the campaign's creation five years ago, which we translate below for our Portuguese-impaired readers.
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| The Swedish Mila Margarine commercial. Image from Juvenal Azaredo's blog |
In 1979 (whoa, it's been 28 years!), I directed the Center's creative nucleus along with my partner, Luis Di Nallo, and went to Sweden to oversee the filming of a commercial for Mila margarine. It's worth a long detour to explain why a Brazilian commercial was made in Sweden.
Initially, the briefing we received from Sanbra was to do a campaign along the lines of that of rival margarine Becel, saying those things about the heart, and so forth and so on, almost to the point of the consumer having to ask for a prescription to consume it.
Then, exchanging ideas with Carlos Edo, director of planning and customer service for the agency and a guy who I unfairly forgot to include in the pantheon of great planners (in the article "When planning and creation were lovers," see here in Portuguese), we concluded that, at that stage of the market (28 years ago, don't forget!) to position Mila almost as a medicine would be to give the product the last rites.
By the way, Mila, which was previously handled by another agency, already had its head in the noose, since its sales were below 80,000 tons, or megatons, or who knows what, and if the new campaign did nor raise sales to a level close to 150 tons or whatever, it would be discontinued by Sanbra.
Well, one day when I went out with Di Nallo for lunch - and I remember the food well, because it was a Wednesday and we went to eat feijoada at a place next door to the French restaurant Freddy - while we were tossing down a caipirinha, in the time-honored way I had an insight, and said, "Man, I've bagged the Mila campaign."
With his air of a Buenos Aires joker, Di Nallo looked at me and asked what I had shot. And then I explained, "You know vegetarians and nudists, those exotic people that nobody takes seriously, but everyone respects their point of view, this thing of healthy living, back to nature?". "Well," I continued, "we'll make the campaign in a nudist colony, where the guys eat only fruits, vegetables, whole-wheat bread and, of course, Mila Margarine, since Mila is part of a healthy life."
The gringo's eyes shone, and the meal finished, we went back to the agency and told the idea to Carlos Edo, who immediately saw the campaign's potential and called in one of his partners, Federico, who was not in the business but had common sense, Otto from Media, Leonardo from Production and Vasco from Customer Service, the unfailing Luiz Gonzaga Vasconcellos, and told them the idea. But, in the retelling, Carlos included a detail that only I, when I created the campaign, had imagined differently, and gave the information that the models were to be kids (I confess that in my mind, the models were almost all adults) which led me to "clam up," as they say.
This change, otherwise, helped us to please all sides, such as Federico Common Sense himself, and all began to applaud the creative solution.
And so it was done. I wrote two scripts, one with children rolling in the snow, to be filmed outside of Brazil, of course, and another with a tropical setting amid the vegetation and climate and Brazil, which was eventually filmed in Guarujá on the São Paulo coast.
[Both films can be seen on Juvenal's son's site The line "A única que veio do milho" means "The only one made from corn", which helps explain why corn on the cob appears so much.]
[Juvenal writes a bit about Sweden, and of the ins and out of the advertising business.]
Closing the subject of Mila, the campaign was in the air, and less than a week later, Sergio Mendes asked the Nucleus to to suspend the campaign.
Mila, which in order not to be discontinued needed to reach the level of 150,000 tons or megatons, I don't know, in less than two weeks in the media reached the mark of 450,000 whatevers, tying Sanbra's production line in knots.
In 1989, and so ten years later, I was in Enio and I had lunch with Maria Ines, product manager for Cica who had recently left Sanbra, and during our conversation at lunch, when she knew I had worked at the Center, she told me that at Sanbra they had considered running the films again, but they had given up due to the difficulty of finding the models (by now no longer children) to obtain authorization. She also said that, in research commissioned by the company, Mila's campaign, despite having been broadcast for no time at all and been off the air for ten years, was still the most remembered in the margarine market. A wonder!
What can we expect of the change in the Ministry of Justice rules, which explicitly allow non-erotic nudity, giving as an example of what's acceptable a documentary of Indians? Certainly, the naturist lifestyle is just as acceptable as that of Indians. But the part of television with the strongest motivation to seize and hold the viewer's attention, is the commercials. This was not the only Mila Margarine commercial to feature nudity, or even nude children. This one came later:
Anything in advertising that works is imitated, and this worked very well indeed. There have been other such commercials. I recall one for leading retail chain C&A for Mothers' Day in 1995, with a bunch of naked children running on the beach.
One that revolved around being set at a nudist beach showed an man selling a new ice-cream bar, and the nudists being ecstatic about how good it was, licking their lips and going "Mmmmm". A nudist mother then covered the eyes of her nudist child, saying the spectacle was "indecent". It's worth noting that although in that case the nudists were of all ages, the protagonists were mother and child.
With the new rules we may see more commercials with nude people, and even with nudists, and perhaps even again nudist children. Certainly there is now a moral hysteria that did not exist thirty years ago, but on the other hand "natural" and "organic" too are far more marketable than they were three decades ago.
The desire to sell stuff has not changed, nor the desire to capture the viewer's attention.
For thirty years the United States has been locking up an ever greater share of the population for ever more minor offenses. That trend is now being slowed not by the realization that it is pointless, cruel and evil, but simply because it is expensive and budgets are tight.
If there is a force that can prevail against unfounded hysteria, it is the thirst for money. The greatest ally of freedom of expression may turn out to be the profit motive, simple greed.
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