Axe Turns Larissa Riquelme Into Paraguay's Most Talked-About Billboard
Axe's 'Larissa Riquelme' campaign is a 2010 ambient advertising execution created by Biedermann McCann in Asunción, Paraguay, designed to generate earned media during the FIFA World Cup by featuring Paraguayan model Larissa Riquelme as a living brand vehicle targeting male consumers.
Biedermann McCann launched the campaign in June 2010, at the precise moment Paraguay's national football team was competing on the world stage and commanding the full attention of the country. The brief, as documented in Clapboard's archive, was unambiguous: stand out during the 2010 FIFA World Cup season operating under a severely limited paid-media budget. Rather than buying conventional television or print placements, the agency pursued a single ambient execution built around one media asset — a strategy that would require the idea itself to do the distribution work.
The campaign's geographic roots are inseparable from its logic. In Paraguay, football is not a spectator sport in the passive sense; it is a communal event that reorganises daily life during major tournaments. The agency recognised that any brand presence woven convincingly into that national moment would be carried forward by press and public conversation rather than paid placement. The Axe logo's association with Larissa Riquelme — Paraguay's most photographed World Cup supporter at the time, according to coverage documented by En Wikipedia and businessinsider.com — meant the brand travelled wherever she did: onto international sports pages, television news segments, and the emerging social media conversation surrounding the tournament. Clapboard assigns this campaign a score of 60 out of 100, reflecting the campaign's cultural reach relative to the craft and strategic ambition evident in its single-asset execution.
Biedermann McCann built the campaign's strategy on a deliberately simple consumer insight. The agency identified two dominant preoccupations in its target male audience in Paraguay during June 2010: football and female celebrity. Fusing both into one ambient execution was the strategic mechanism by which a low-budget campaign could compete with far better-resourced rivals for share of attention during the tournament period, as documented in Clapboard's campaign record.
The competitive environment for male personal care in 2010 was significant. Axe operated in a global men's grooming category alongside rivals including Nivea Men and Old Spice, both of which were investing heavily in broadcast advertising around major sporting events. Old Spice's 'The Man Your Man Could Smell Like' campaign, which launched earlier in 2010, had already demonstrated the power of earned media in the personal care category, according to widely reported industry commentary at the time. Against that backdrop, Biedermann McCann's decision to route entirely around paid media in Paraguay — and instead manufacture a single, photogenic ambient moment — represented a calculated asymmetric bet. Rather than matching competitor budgets, the campaign sought to make budget irrelevance its advantage.
The strategic logic extended to the choice of Larissa Riquelme herself. As reported by en.wikipedia.org, Riquelme became one of the most internationally photographed figures associated with the 2010 FIFA World Cup, her image circulating across global sports media during Paraguay's tournament run. Her existing visibility meant the Axe association did not need paid amplification to reach beyond Paraguay's borders — the press infrastructure of the World Cup provided distribution for free. That structural insight, identifying a moment when organic media velocity would do the work of a media buy, is the campaign's most transferable strategic lesson.
The 'Larissa Riquelme' campaign comprised a single ambient media asset, a deliberate creative constraint that forced the execution to be immediately legible and independently shareable. Executive creative director Federico Perie led the Biedermann McCann team in Asunción, Paraguay, with creative direction shared across Oscar Vera, Marcos Valdez, and Ale Rebull. Vera served as copywriter and Rebull as art director, according to Clapboard's production records.
The creative concept centred on what the agency described as the 'sexiest billboard' — an ambient execution in which the Axe brand identity was placed on Larissa Riquelme's person, transforming her into a mobile, living advertisement during the 2010 FIFA World Cup. The creative decision to use a human body as the medium rather than a static surface was not incidental. It ensured that every press photograph taken of Riquelme during Paraguay's World Cup matches became, by extension, an Axe brand impression. As documented by sportsagentblog.com and globalvoices.org, Riquelme was photographed extensively during the tournament, including images that circulated widely in international sports and entertainment media, each carrying the brand forward without additional cost.
The art direction under Ale Rebull was minimal by necessity and by design. With a single media asset and no broadcast production to manage, the creative team's primary task was casting and placement — ensuring the brand mark was visible, legible, and photographable under the variable conditions of a live sporting event. The simplicity of the execution is also its most debated quality: the campaign's reliance on a conventionally sexualised image of a woman to sell a men's fragrance product followed a creative playbook that Axe had established globally over the preceding decade, raising questions about creative originality even as the ambient mechanic showed genuine tactical ingenuity.
No independently verified performance data for the 'Larissa Riquelme' campaign — including confirmed earned-media valuations, reach figures, impressions totals, sales lift, or brand-lift measurements — is publicly available. The campaign's own documentation, as archived on Clapboard, claims the execution generated 'millions and millions of dollars' in free press, but this figure has not been substantiated by a named third-party source, and Clapboard treats it as a directional characterisation rather than a verified metric.
What the available evidence does confirm is structural. Larissa Riquelme's profile during the 2010 FIFA World Cup was genuinely global. As reported by businessinsider.com and en.wikipedia.org, she became one of the most widely covered non-player personalities associated with the tournament, with her image appearing across international sports media throughout Paraguay's run. That organic press velocity provided a distribution mechanism that no paid-media budget of comparable size could have replicated, and it gave the Axe brand access to audiences well beyond Paraguay's domestic market.
The Clapboard Score of 60 out of 100 reflects this tension accurately. The campaign demonstrates real strategic intelligence in its identification of an earned-media opportunity and its low-cost ambient mechanic. It loses ground on creative ambition — the conceptual territory of 'attractive woman plus men's product' was already heavily occupied in Axe's own global advertising history by 2010 — and on the absence of any documented measurement framework. For a campaign that claimed mass reach, the lack of verified data limits the case that can be made for its effectiveness beyond anecdote and press clip volume.
Axe's 'Larissa Riquelme' campaign was a June 2010 ambient execution by Biedermann McCann in Asunción, Paraguay. It featured Paraguayan model Larissa Riquelme as a living brand vehicle during the FIFA World Cup, designed to generate earned media coverage for Axe among male consumers with a minimal paid-media budget.
Biedermann McCann in Asunción, Paraguay created the campaign. Executive creative director Federico Perie led the team, with creative directors Oscar Vera, Marcos Valdez, and Ale Rebull. Vera served as copywriter and Rebull as art director, all working under the McCann network for the Axe brand.
Axe chose Larissa Riquelme because she was Paraguay's most photographed World Cup supporter in 2010, according to coverage documented by en.wikipedia.org and businessinsider.com. Her existing press visibility meant the Axe brand travelled into international sports media organically, providing distribution that no comparable paid-media budget could have replicated.
The campaign claimed to generate millions of dollars in earned media press coverage, as documented in Clapboard's archive. However, no independently verified reach figures, sales lift, or brand-lift data are publicly available. Clapboard rates the campaign 60 out of 100, reflecting strong tactical ingenuity alongside limited creative originality and absent verified metrics.
Biedermann McCann built a single ambient asset rather than buying paid media placements, relying on the FIFA World Cup's global press infrastructure to distribute the Axe brand image for free. By associating the brand with Larissa Riquelme during Paraguay's tournament run, the agency converted her organic media coverage into brand impressions at minimal cost.
Industry assessment is mixed. Clapboard scores the campaign 60 out of 100, crediting its earned-media strategy and ambient mechanic while noting that its conceptual territory — associating a men's fragrance with a sexualised female image — was already heavily established within Axe's own global advertising history by the time of the 2010 Paraguay execution.
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