How BrewDog and Leo Burnett Turned Waze Into a Drunk-Driving Warning at São Paulo Carnival
BrewDog Beer's #ThrowBackCrash is a digital campaign created by Leo Burnett Tailor Made and activated across Waze during São Paulo Carnival in March 2019, surfacing the locations of approximately 50 historical alcohol-related fatal road crashes to warn drivers against drinking and driving in Brazil.
The campaign's mechanics were deliberately simple and visceral. Leo Burnett Tailor Made mapped roughly 50 real, historically documented fatal crashes caused by alcohol consumption onto the Waze navigation platform. When a driver approached one of those locations, Waze surfaced an accident alert in its familiar interface. Selecting that alert revealed the historical crash information alongside the warning: "Don't drink and drive. Don't let it happen again." The medium became the message — a navigation app used by millions of drivers became a real-time memorial to the consequences of drunk driving.
In Brazil, the campaign ran for a 15-day activation period timed precisely to coincide with São Paulo Carnival, as reported by marcommnews.com. Carnival represents one of the highest-risk periods for alcohol-related road incidents in the country, with beer consumption peaking during the December-to-February window and the Carnival period itself, according to industry analysis cited by Clapboard. Choosing Waze as the activation platform was therefore both contextually precise and strategically acute: the audience most likely to be navigating unfamiliar streets after drinking was the audience the campaign needed to reach.
BrewDog Beer, a brand founded in 2007 with a stated mission to make people passionate about craft beer, according to En Wikipedia, positioned #ThrowBackCrash not as a conventional public-service announcement but as a brand-led road-safety intervention embedded within the digital infrastructure drivers already trusted. The campaign was submitted for industry recognition approximately six years ago and carries a Clapboard Score of 51 out of 100.
Brazil is one of the world's largest beer markets. In 2018, Brazil produced approximately 14.1 billion litres of beer, according to Export Flandersinvestmentandtrade, and the Brazilian beer sector generated approximately R$107 billion that year — equivalent to roughly 1.6 percent of national GDP — while supporting around 2.7 million direct and indirect jobs, also per export.flandersinvestmentandtrade.com. By 2019, Brazil's beer-market value had reached approximately US$17.2 billion, with industry volume growing approximately 3 percent to reach roughly 14 billion litres, according to Apps Fas Usda Gov. Within this intensely competitive market, Brazil counted approximately 1,178 registered craft breweries in 2019, per Clapboard.
BrewDog operates in the premium craft segment of this market, where brand distinctiveness is existential. Larger competitors including Ambev — the dominant domestic operator backed by AB InBev, according to ab-inbev.com — and Heineken Brasil command substantial distribution scale and media investment that craft entrants cannot match through conventional advertising spend alone. For BrewDog, creating cultural relevance through a purposeful act carries more strategic weight than outspending rivals on broadcast media.
The insight driving #ThrowBackCrash was precise. Carnival is not merely a cultural celebration in Brazil — it is the single period when alcohol consumption, public mobility, and road risk converge most acutely. By activating within Waze, Leo Burnett Tailor Made reached drivers at the exact moment they were navigating, in real time, through the same streets where fatal crashes had previously occurred. The geographic and temporal specificity of that insight transformed a road-safety message from an abstraction into an immediate, location-anchored reality. Waze's alert interface, already trusted by users for traffic and hazard information, lent the campaign an authority that a conventional out-of-home execution could not have replicated in Brazil.
Wilson Mateos, Vice President of Creation and Executive Creative Director at Leo Burnett Tailor Made, led #ThrowBackCrash as creative lead, as documented by both Clapboard and Wilsonmateos Com Br. Érica Rocha served as Marketing Manager for BrewDog São Paulo and represented the client through the campaign's development and execution.
The creative decision at the heart of #ThrowBackCrash was one of deliberate restraint. Rather than producing a high-production film or immersive installation, the team made the pre-existing Waze alert interface the creative canvas. No new visual language was invented. The alert icons, the tap-to-expand interaction, the map overlay — all of it was native Waze behaviour that Brazilian drivers already recognised and trusted. What Leo Burnett Tailor Made contributed was the data layer: the meticulous research and mapping of approximately 50 historically documented fatal alcohol-related crashes onto precise São Paulo coordinates, as reported by jai-un-pote-dans-la.com and corroborated by adsoftheworld.com.
The copywriting approach was equally spare. When a driver selected an alert, the screen did not deliver a lecture. It delivered a location-specific crash record and two sentences: an account of what had happened there before, and the line "Don't drink and drive. Don't let it happen again." That compression — factual, personal, geographically grounded — is where the campaign's creative power resided. The real-world crash data did the emotional work that a scripted narrative would have struggled to achieve.
The campaign contained a single media asset, as noted by Clapboard. That constraint underscores the strategic confidence of the execution: the entire campaign rested on one interaction mechanic deployed across 50 mapped locations in Brazil over 15 days. For a digital campaign built in 2019, it demonstrated an understanding of how ambient, contextual media environments can outperform volume-based content strategies when the message is sufficiently precise.
No independently verified performance data — such as Waze alert engagement rates, reach figures, or documented changes in drunk-driving incidents attributable to the campaign — is publicly available for #ThrowBackCrash, per Clapboard's records. adsoftheworld.com and marcommnews.com both covered the campaign at launch in 2019, confirming its execution and public profile, but neither source published quantified outcome metrics.
Structurally, the campaign's effectiveness rests on several compounding factors that are analytically assessable. Temporal precision — a 15-day activation aligned to São Paulo Carnival — ensured that the message reached the highest-risk audience segment during the highest-risk period. Platform integration within Waze meant that engagement was not dependent on a viewer choosing to watch an advertisement; it was triggered by physical proximity to a crash site, creating an involuntary but entirely contextually legitimate moment of confrontation.
The decision to limit the campaign to approximately 50 precisely mapped locations in Brazil rather than deploy broadly across the Waze network also signals craft confidence: specificity of location amplified the credibility of each individual alert. A crash that happened on a named street, at a named time, carries more persuasive force than an aggregate statistic. That structural logic is sound, regardless of the absence of published conversion data.
#ThrowBackCrash carries a Clapboard Score of 51 out of 100. That score reflects the campaign's conceptual clarity and contextual intelligence while acknowledging the constraints of a single-asset execution without documented audience-scale or measurable outcome data available for public assessment.
#ThrowBackCrash was a BrewDog Beer digital campaign created by Leo Burnett Tailor Made and activated on the Waze navigation app during São Paulo Carnival in March 2019. It mapped approximately 50 historical alcohol-related fatal crashes as Waze alerts, showing drivers location-specific crash data and the message "Don't drink and drive." The campaign ran for 15 days, as reported by marcommnews.com.
Leo Burnett Tailor Made used Waze because it reached drivers navigating São Paulo streets in real time. By embedding crash alerts within an app drivers already trusted for hazard information, the campaign delivered a road-safety warning at precisely the moment and location where it was most relevant, during Brazil's highest-risk drinking period — Carnival, as documented by jai-un-pote-dans-la.com.
#ThrowBackCrash was created by Leo Burnett Tailor Made in Brazil. Wilson Mateos, Vice President of Creation and Executive Creative Director at Leo Burnett Tailor Made, led the campaign creatively, as documented by wilsonmateos.com.br and Clapboard. Érica Rocha served as Marketing Manager for BrewDog São Paulo and represented the client throughout the campaign's development and activation.
#ThrowBackCrash launched in March 2019 and ran for 15 days in Brazil, timed to coincide with São Paulo Carnival, as reported by marcommnews.com. Carnival represents the period of peak beer consumption and elevated road risk in Brazil, making it the strategically optimal window for a drunk-driving awareness activation of this kind.
#ThrowBackCrash received a Clapboard Score of 51 out of 100. The score reflects the campaign's strong conceptual clarity and precise contextual execution on Waze during São Paulo Carnival 2019, while accounting for its single-asset format and the absence of publicly available, independently verified audience-scale or outcome performance data for the Brazil activation.
BrewDog, founded in 2007 with a mission to champion craft beer, according to en.wikipedia.org, used #ThrowBackCrash to build brand distinctiveness in Brazil's competitive craft segment rather than outspending rivals on conventional media. In a market with approximately 1,178 registered craft breweries in 2019, per Clapboard, purpose-led campaigns offered BrewDog a credible alternative to volume-based advertising strategies.
.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
