Bradesco's 'New BIA Responses Against Harassment' campaign saw Publicis Brazil reprogram the bank's AI to reject abuse, reaching over 105 million YouTube views
Bradesco Turns BIA Into a Voice Against Harassment in Brazil
Bradesco's 'New BIA Responses Against Harassment' is a 2021 integrated campaign created by Publicis Brazil in which the bank reprogrammed its artificial intelligence assistant, BIA, to respond assertively to offensive and sexually harassing messages rather than deflecting them, using the real volume of abuse received in 2020 to expose the broader harassment women face in Brazilian society.
BIA, Bradesco's virtual assistant, received approximately 95,000 offensive and sexually harassing messages during 2020, according to campaign documentation cited by Propmark Com Br and Meioemensagem Com Br. That figure, drawn directly from the bank's own interaction logs, formed the moral and strategic core of the campaign. Although BIA is not a human being, the scale of abuse directed at a female-coded AI voice was treated as a direct mirror of the harassment real women experience daily in Brazil and beyond. The campaign launched on April 5, 2021, with its film airing during the April 5 edition of Jornal Nacional, Globo's national evening news programme — one of the most-watched broadcast slots in the country.
In Brazil, the campaign operated across television, online video, out-of-home projections, social media activations, employee engagement content, and a dedicated landing page carrying a manifesto and harassment information, as reported by Gkpb Com Br and meioemensagem.com.br. The creative mechanics were direct: voice-overs reproduced real harassing messages BIA had received, projected onto walls and dramatised on screen, before the film pivoted to reveal BIA's new, assertive responses. The action aligned Bradesco with UNESCO's Hey Update My Voice initiative, a global movement launched in 2020 calling for AI assistants to be updated to reject harassment rather than respond passively. Clapboard rates this campaign 82 out of 100, recognising its combination of authentic data, cultural relevance, and structural integration across channels.
Bradesco identified a genuine tension inside its own technology infrastructure. BIA's default passive response to offensive messages — "I didn't understand, could you repeat?" — was designed to prompt calmer rephrasing, but it inadvertently modelled the same silence and deflection that harassment culture imposes on women. In rewriting those responses, the bank transformed an internal operational update into a public statement with social force.
In Brazil, the banking sector is highly concentrated. According to Bcb Gov Br, the five largest banks — Caixa, Banco do Brasil, Itaú, Bradesco, and Santander — held 81.4% of Brazil's credit market in 2021, and 74.9% of total banking assets. Within that environment, Bradesco competes directly with Itaú Unibanco and Banco do Brasil for both market share and cultural relevance. Itaú, in particular, has invested heavily in purpose-driven communications in recent years. Bradesco's decision to anchor a campaign to a verifiable, internally sourced data point — the 95,000 abusive messages BIA received — gave the initiative a credibility that purely aspirational advertising cannot manufacture.
The strategic alignment with UNESCO's Hey Update My Voice initiative, as documented by Estadao Com Br and Valor Globo, extended Bradesco's reach beyond domestic audiences and positioned the campaign within a recognised global framework for responsible AI development. Rather than inventing a cause, Publicis Brazil connected an existing internal product reality to an established international movement, giving the campaign both local and global legitimacy. The insight was precise: a female-coded AI receives the same kind of harassment as a woman in the street, and a bank with reach into millions of Brazilian households is positioned to make that observation matter at scale.
The film opens with a disclaimer that the offences about to be heard are real. That single editorial choice — "As ofensas a seguir são reais" — sets the tone for everything that follows, as documented in Bradesco's own campaign description cited by gkpb.com.br and meioemensagem.com.br. The creative refuses to sanitise or summarise the abuse; it plays it back in full, using voice-overs layered over projections on walls to give the words physical presence in real urban space.
The production technique of projecting the interactions onto architectural surfaces turned a digital problem into a public one, making harassment that typically occurs in private, screenbound exchanges visible and inescapable. The contrast between the passive former response and BIA's new replies was the engine of the creative. Where BIA once said "I didn't understand, could you repeat?", she now says — in direct translation — "These words are inappropriate; they should not be used with me or anyone else" and "It may seem like a joke to you; for me, it was violent." Those lines, documented by propmark.com.br and estadao.com.br, are not advertising copy in the conventional sense; they are live product changes, captured on film.
BIA's response to requests for photographs also shifted to: "A photo? Although I speak like a human, I am an artificial intelligence" — a line that simultaneously deflects harassment and clarifies the nature of AI personhood. Production credits for the New BIA Responses Against Harassment campaign are not fully and publicly documented beyond the agency credit to Publicis Brazil. The campaign's integration across out-of-home, broadcast, digital, and internal employee content, as reported by Noticias R7 and Publicis Com Br, indicates a production operation of significant scope coordinated across multiple formats under a single creative idea.
The New BIA Responses Against Harassment campaign generated measurable and rapid audience response. The campaign film exceeded 105 million YouTube views within six days of its April 5, 2021 launch, reaching that figure by April 12, 2021, according to clapboard.com. That velocity of viewership — achieved inside one week on a single platform — is structurally unusual for financial services advertising in Brazil and reflects the campaign's placement in a high-reach broadcast environment alongside organic digital amplification.
As also reported by clapboard.com, the film carried approximately 7,000 likes and 25,000 dislikes as of April 12, 2021, a ratio that itself became part of the public conversation around the campaign. The volume of negative reactions was read by many observers as confirmation of the harassment culture the campaign was documenting, rather than as evidence of creative failure. The campaign's airing during Jornal Nacional — Globo's flagship national evening news programme, one of the most-watched broadcasts in Brazil — provided an initial audience base of exceptional scale before digital sharing accelerated distribution further, as reported by propmark.com.br.
No additional verified performance data — such as brand-lift figures, earned media valuations, or conversion metrics — is publicly available for this campaign. What the viewership data does confirm is structural effectiveness: the creative was built around a true data point, deployed in a high-trust editorial context, and designed to provoke a response. The dislike volume, rather than undermining the campaign, functioned as real-time social evidence of the problem it set out to address. Clapboard scores this campaign 82 out of 100.
Bradesco's New BIA Responses Against Harassment is a 2021 integrated campaign by Publicis Brazil. It reprogrammed the bank's AI assistant, BIA, to respond assertively to abusive messages rather than deflecting them, using the approximately 95,000 offensive messages BIA received in 2020 as documented evidence of broader harassment culture in Brazil.
The campaign film exceeded 105 million YouTube views within six days of its April 5, 2021 launch, according to clapboard.com. It aired during Jornal Nacional on Globo before spreading digitally, reaching that figure by April 12, 2021, making it one of the fastest-performing financial services films in Brazil that year.
UNESCO's Hey Update My Voice initiative, launched in 2020, called for AI voice assistants to be updated to reject harassment rather than respond passively. Bradesco aligned the BIA campaign with this global movement, as reported by estadao.com.br and valor.globo.com, giving the bank's internal product change an internationally recognised framework and social purpose.
BIA's former passive response was "I didn't understand, could you repeat?" Publicis Brazil replaced this with assertive replies including "These words are inappropriate; they should not be used with me or anyone else" and "It may seem like a joke to you; for me, it was violent," as documented by propmark.com.br and estadao.com.br.
Publicis Brazil created the New BIA Responses Against Harassment campaign for Bradesco. The integrated campaign launched in April 2021 and ran across television, online video, out-of-home, social media, and a dedicated landing page, as reported by gkpb.com.br, meioemensagem.com.br, and noticias.r7.com.
Bradesco operates in a concentrated market where, according to bcb.gov.br, the five largest banks held 81.4% of Brazil's credit market in 2021. Competitors including Itaú Unibanco invest heavily in purpose-driven communications. Bradesco's use of internally sourced abuse data gave the BIA campaign a factual specificity that distinguishes it from aspirational brand advertising.
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