Biscoitos Zezé and agency Mark+ launched Friends Desk in Brazil in July 2017, a public-interest film addressing the decline of shared family meals and
Biscoitos Zezé Turns a School Desk Into a Statement on Human Connection
Friends Desk is a public-interest film campaign created by Biscoitos Zezé and agency Mark+ in Brazil in July 2017, addressing the cultural decline of families gathering around a shared table for meals and conversation.
Biscoitos Zezé, a confectionery and snacks brand rooted in southern Brazil, partnered with Mark+, a Pelotas-based agency, to produce a single-asset film through production company Carma Social Interventions. The campaign positions the brand not as a product advertiser but as a cultural advocate, using the public-interest category to frame biscuits as a prompt for human reconnection rather than a consumption proposition. The creative premise is disarmingly simple: the shared table, once a cornerstone of Brazilian domestic life, is disappearing, and something as modest as a snack can serve as a reason to gather again.
In Brazil, where family and communal rituals carry deep social significance, the campaign speaks directly to a felt loss. Friends Desk does not traffic in sentimentality for its own sake. It identifies a behavioural shift — the fragmentation of collective mealtimes — and assigns Biscoitos Zezé a role in reversing it. The film medium was chosen deliberately. A single, carefully constructed film allows the narrative to unfold with emotional specificity that static formats cannot achieve. Carma Social Interventions, credited as the production company, signals an intent to treat the work as genuine social intervention rather than conventional advertising. Creative direction on the project was handled by Ramon Ballverdú and Thomaz Ballverdú, whose surnames suggest a family collaboration that mirrors the familial themes at the heart of the work. Clapboard's editorial team assigned the campaign a score of 63 out of 100 on the Clapboard creative archive index, a proprietary measure of creative craft and strategic coherence, not a business-effectiveness rating.
Mark+ built Friends Desk on a durable strategic insight: snack brands earn cultural relevance not by celebrating the product but by celebrating the human moment the product inhabits.
In Brazil, the erosion of communal mealtimes reflects a broader global pattern of social atomisation driven by digital devices, irregular work schedules, and shrinking household sizes. For a regional confectionery brand competing in a market dominated by multinationals, this insight creates a meaningful opening. Rather than competing on taste, price, or pack innovation against global players such as Mondelēz International, which held an estimated ten to fifteen per cent share of the global biscuit market in 2017 according to The Insight Partners, or Nestlé, which held an estimated three to six per cent share in the same period per The Insight Partners, Biscoitos Zezé chose to compete on emotional territory that large corporations find harder to occupy authentically.
The global biscuit market was valued at approximately US$76.4 billion in 2017, according to The Insight Partners, and was described by the same source as highly fragmented, with regional brands, artisanal producers, and national labels collectively commanding a substantial combined share. That fragmentation is precisely the structural condition that makes a strategy like Friends Desk viable. A regional Brazilian brand cannot outspend Mondelēz, but it can out-mean it in the specific cultural context where it operates. Friends Desk sits within a deliberate agency lineage. Mark+ had previously created Chair on the Street for Biscoitos Zezé in April 2015, a campaign addressing the decline of Brazilian neighbours socialising outside their homes, as documented by Jornal do Comércio. In September 2015 the same agency launched Compliments at the Traffic Light, pairing street displays to encourage face-to-face kindness, as reported by Exame. Friends Desk extends and deepens this social-intervention philosophy into the domestic sphere.
Carma Social Interventions produced Friends Desk as a single film asset, the sole media unit in the campaign's public archive.
The choice of a single film is itself a creative declaration. Where most confectionery campaigns in Brazil rely on broad reach across multiple formats — television spots, digital banners, outdoor activations — Friends Desk concentrates all creative energy into one carefully realised moving-image piece. That discipline is consistent with the social-intervention model that Carma Social Interventions brings to the production. A social intervention film is not measured by frequency of exposure but by depth of emotional impact per viewing. The title Friends Desk carries a layered meaning. A desk is a site of solitary work or study, the antithesis of the communal table. By naming the campaign Friends Desk, Mark+ introduces a productive tension: the object associated with isolation becomes, through the film's narrative logic, a prompt for connection. This kind of conceptual inversion is a marker of confident creative thinking.
Creative credits for Friends Desk are attributed to Ramon Ballverdú and Thomaz Ballverdú, as documented in the campaign archive. Their involvement as the named creative voices anchors the work in a specific authorial sensibility. The surname shared between the two credited creatives reinforces, whether by design or coincidence, the campaign's central argument about familial bonds. Production credits beyond the Carma Social Interventions company name and the two credited creatives are not publicly documented in available sources. The film was published in July 2017 in Brazil, entering the public domain during the Southern Hemisphere winter, a season in Brazil associated with indoor gathering — a contextually apt launch moment for a campaign about reclaiming shared domestic rituals.
No verified performance data for Friends Desk is publicly available. No confirmed entries or wins for the campaign have been identified across Cannes Lions, the Effie Awards, the One Show, D&AD, the Clio Awards, or the Webby Awards, as searched across clapboard.com records.
Absence of measurable data does not diminish the structural case for the campaign's effectiveness. Friends Desk operates in the public-interest register, where the primary currency is cultural resonance rather than conversion. The campaign's single-asset, single-medium structure concentrates creative investment and prevents dilution of the central idea. The social-intervention lineage established by Mark+ across its prior Biscoitos Zezé work — Chair on the Street in 2015 and Compliments at the Traffic Light in the same year, as documented by Jornal do Comércio and Exame respectively — means Friends Desk benefits from accumulated brand equity in purposeful storytelling. Consumers in Brazil who encountered earlier campaigns arrive at Friends Desk with a pre-established frame of expectation, which amplifies the emotional efficiency of the film without additional media investment.
Clapboard's proprietary creative archive index places Friends Desk at 63 out of 100. That score reflects a campaign with a coherent and defensible creative strategy, competent execution, and a clear point of view, held back from higher assessment by the limited scope of a single asset and the absence of verifiable impact data. For a regional confectionery brand operating in a highly fragmented Brazilian snacks market, Friends Desk represents a disciplined use of social-purpose positioning as a competitive differentiator against the scale advantages of global players.
Friends Desk is a public-interest film created by Biscoitos Zezé and agency Mark+ in Brazil in July 2017. Produced by Carma Social Interventions with creative direction by Ramon Ballverdú and Thomaz Ballverdú, it addresses the cultural decline of shared family mealtimes and positions the brand as a prompt for human reconnection.
Mark+, a Pelotas-based Brazilian agency, created Friends Desk for Biscoitos Zezé. Mark+ has built a consistent social-intervention philosophy for the brand across multiple campaigns since 2015, including Chair on the Street and Compliments at the Traffic Light, as documented by Jornal do Comércio and Exame.
Ramon Ballverdú and Thomaz Ballverdú are credited as the creatives behind Friends Desk, as documented in the campaign archive. Their shared surname mirrors the familial and communal themes central to the campaign's narrative about reclaiming shared domestic rituals in Brazil.
Mark+ positioned Friends Desk as cultural advocacy rather than product promotion. In a highly fragmented Brazilian confectionery market dominated by multinationals such as Mondelēz International, the strategy allowed Biscoitos Zezé to compete on emotional and cultural territory where regional authenticity provides a structural advantage over global scale.
No verified awards for Friends Desk have been identified. Searches across clapboard.com records found no confirmed entries or wins at Cannes Lions, the Effie Awards, the One Show, D&AD, the Clio Awards, or the Webby Awards. Clapboard's creative archive index assigned the campaign a score of 63 out of 100.
Friends Desk is the third known social-intervention campaign produced by Mark+ for Biscoitos Zezé in Brazil. It follows Chair on the Street from April 2015 and Compliments at the Traffic Light from September 2015, as reported by Jornal do Comércio and Exame, extending the brand's focus from public spaces into the domestic environment.
.webp)
Creative Collaboration Platform: The Backbone of Modern Creative WorkWhat is a creative collaboration platform?Clapboard defines a creative collaboration platform as the operational core for today’s distributed creative teams. This is not a collection of digital collaboration tools stitched together; Clapboard’s system
Understanding the Creative Production MarketplaceWhat is a Creative Production Marketplace?Clapboard defines a creative production marketplace as a structured ecosystem where brands, agencies, and production talent converge to execute video, advertising, and branded content at scale. Unlike the legacy agency or freelanREAD FULL ARTICLE
The Urgent Need for a Creative Production Operating SystemWhy Traditional Creative Production Models Break DownClapboard sees the creative production landscape shifting under pressure. Content velocity is no longer a buzzword—it’s a mandate. Modern advertising demands relentless output across dozens of channels, each wREAD FULL ARTICLE
