Getty Images launched Coma in Brazil in June 2019, a three-episode original miniseries created by AlmapBBDO using only existing image-bank content and no live
ARCHIVEGetty Images Turns Its Own Archive Into a Three-Episode Brazilian Miniseries
Coma is a three-episode original miniseries created for Getty Images by AlmapBBDO São Paulo in Brazil, published in June 2019, and produced entirely from existing assets inside Getty's image library without a single set, hired actor, or newly shot frame of footage.
The campaign, formally titled Coma — A Getty Images Original Series, follows David, a sarcastic patient who wakes from a coma and must reconstruct his identity using only the still images and moving content contained within Getty Images' archive. The narrative premise is at once a product demonstration and a piece of serialised entertainment — each episode functions as proof that the breadth and emotional range of Getty's library can carry a complete dramatic story. In Brazil, where streaming culture and audience appetite for episodic content had already reshaped media consumption habits by 2019, the format was deliberately chosen to meet audiences on their own terms, engaging what the creative team described, as reported by LatinSpots, as viewers "addicted to watching series."
The campaign was conceived and produced by AlmapBBDO Brazil, with production handled by Stink Films, and published across YouTube, Facebook, and a dedicated campaign website. The third and final episode was recorded on 10 June 2019, per LatinSpots, placing the campaign's full rollout across the April–June 2019 window, with Caples listing 30 April 2019 as the campaign entry date, as documented by caples.org. Getty Images positioned Coma as a global-scale demonstration of the creative potential locked inside image-bank content, using Brazil as its launch market and AlmapBBDO as its creative partner. The Clapboard Score for this campaign is 79 out of 100.
Getty Images operates in a competitive global stock-content market shaped by rivals including Shutterstock and Adobe Stock. By 2019, the stock-image industry was estimated at approximately four billion US dollars globally, though no independently audited figure has been confirmed for that year, per umbrex.com's market research summaries. Within Brazil specifically, the professionalisation of digital media production was accelerating demand for high-quality licensed visual content, creating both an opportunity and a perception challenge for Getty Images: the brand's archive was vast, but "stock footage" as a category carried creative stigma among agency and brand buyers.
AlmapBBDO's strategic answer was to dissolve that stigma not through a product claim but through a demonstration. Rather than telling the Brazilian market that Getty Images' library was creatively rich, the agency showed it by building an entire narrative series from that library alone. As reported by shots.net, Coma was described as an inventive advance over Getty's earlier stock-footage work, precisely because the production constraint — no sets, no actors, no new footage — was the creative engine rather than a limitation to work around. Competitors such as Shutterstock and Adobe Stock were competing on volume and price in the Brazil market at the time; Getty Images, through Coma, competed on creative credibility and cultural relevance instead.
The decision to use a serialised format was grounded in a clear audience insight. LatinSpots reported that AlmapBBDO built the campaign concept around the popularity of serialised entertainment and the behaviour of audiences deeply habituated to binge-watching episodic content. In Brazil, where streaming platform adoption was growing rapidly by 2019, that insight was directly market-relevant. Coma met professional buyers — creative directors, art directors, and content producers — in the same entertainment register they occupied as consumers, making the product argument feel native rather than intrusive.
Coma was produced by Stink Films for AlmapBBDO Brazil, and stands as one of the more structurally unusual production commissions of 2019 in the Latin American market. The campaign's creative leadership at AlmapBBDO was substantial: Chief Creative Officer Luiz Sanches oversaw the project, with Executive Creative Directors Bruno Prosperi, Keka Morelle, Marcelo Nogueira, André Gola, and Pernil shaping the creative direction, as documented by latinspots.com and Voxnews Com Br. The hands-on creative team comprised Thom Bregantin, Israel Medeiros, Pedro Corbett, and Gustavo Tasselli, with digital creative direction led by Luciana Haguiara and digital creatives Bruno Bizuti and Marco Leal. UX design was handled by Caroline Kayatt, per latinspots.com.
The central craft challenge was editorial and curatorial rather than conventional production: the team had to identify, sequence, and contextualise assets from Getty Images' archive in a way that sustained character, narrative momentum, and emotional tone across three episodes. David, the coma patient protagonist, needed to feel like a coherent dramatic character despite being assembled entirely from pre-existing imagery. The sarcasm and personality attributed to him in the script had to be supported by found footage and stills that were never originally intended to perform that function — a constraint that demanded both a strong editorial sensibility and an unusually precise understanding of the full depth of Getty's holdings in Brazil and globally.
As reported by LatinSpots, the series also incorporated elements described as the intersection of reality and imagination, giving the production a tonal range that moved between documentary realism and heightened drama — all within the boundaries of the archive. The campaign extended beyond the episodes themselves to include a supporting website, sales collateral, and social media presence on YouTube and Facebook, each requiring the same discipline of building communication from existing image-bank material rather than commissioning new assets.
ARCHIVEComa earned a Silver Lion in the Film Lions category at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, as reported by adsoftheworld.com and latinspots.com. The campaign also received a Caples entry, with caples.org listing it among recognised work from the 2019 cycle. These are the verified performance and recognition data points publicly available for the campaign. No independent viewership figures, click-through rates, or sales-impact metrics for the Brazil market have been publicly disclosed by Getty Images or AlmapBBDO.
What the Silver Lion recognition does confirm is that the campaign's structural logic was judged effective by the industry's most prominent creative jury. Film Lions entries are evaluated on storytelling, craft, and the integrity of the creative idea — and Coma's constraint-based production, in which the entire series was assembled from image-bank content with no live shooting, represented a genuinely novel entry into that category. As noted by shots.net, the campaign was positioned as an advance over Getty's prior stock-footage advertising work, suggesting the brand itself regarded Coma as a meaningful escalation of its creative ambition in Brazil and internationally.
From a structural effectiveness standpoint, the campaign operates on two simultaneous levels. It functions as entertainment capable of attracting an audience that would actively choose to watch it, and it functions as a product demonstration that makes the creative case for Getty Images' archive through the act of using it. That dual operation — often described in planning as "earned attention" — is among the harder creative problems to solve in professional services advertising, and Coma's Cannes recognition suggests it solved it with unusual coherence.
Coma is a three-episode original miniseries created for Getty Images by AlmapBBDO Brazil in 2019. It was produced entirely from assets inside Getty's existing image library, with no sets, hired actors, or newly shot footage. The series follows David, a coma patient reconstructing his identity through archive imagery, as reported by LatinSpots.
AlmapBBDO São Paulo created Coma for Getty Images, with Stink Films handling production. Chief Creative Officer Luiz Sanches led the project, supported by Executive Creative Directors Bruno Prosperi, Keka Morelle, Marcelo Nogueira, André Gola, and Pernil, as documented by latinspots.com and voxnews.com.br.
Coma won a Silver Lion in the Film Lions category at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, as reported by adsoftheworld.com and latinspots.com. The campaign was also recognised with a Caples entry, per caples.org, making it one of AlmapBBDO Brazil's most decorated professional services campaigns of 2019.
AlmapBBDO built Coma as a miniseries to engage audiences already habituated to episodic streaming content, as reported by LatinSpots. In Brazil's rapidly growing streaming market, the serialised format allowed Getty Images to reach creative professionals as entertainment consumers, making the product demonstration feel native rather than interruptive.
The production team at Stink Films and AlmapBBDO Brazil curated, sequenced, and contextualised existing still images and video assets from Getty Images' archive to construct character, narrative, and tone across three episodes. As reported by shots.net, the constraint of using only image-bank content was the creative engine of the entire campaign.
The Getty Images Coma campaign holds a Clapboard Score of 79 out of 100. The score reflects the campaign's structural originality, its Silver Lion recognition at Cannes Lions as reported by adsoftheworld.com, and the coherence of its constraint-based production model as a professional services advertising case from Brazil in 2019.
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