Associação Atlética Ponte Preta partnered with the São Paulo State Health Department in May 2018 to launch #shieldthemonkeys, a digital campaign defending
How Ponte Preta and São Paulo Health Department Made a Shirt Say Save the Monkeys
The #shieldthemonkeys campaign is a 2018 Brazilian public-interest initiative created by ad agency Aktuellmix for Associação Atlética Ponte Preta and the São Paulo State Health Department, using the football club's iconic monkey mascot to counter the dangerous and widespread misconception that monkeys transmit yellow fever, urging citizens across Brazil to pursue vaccination rather than persecute wildlife.
The campaign launched on April 11, 2018, at a Copa do Brasil match between Ponte Preta and Náutico, as reported by Gustavofrison Com Br. In an act designed to arrest public attention, Ponte Preta removed the club crest from its match shirts, replacing it with a message defending monkeys. The gesture was deliberate and legible: the absence of the crest created the question, and the campaign messaging provided the answer. The dual Portuguese and English hashtags — #aculpanãoédosmacacos ("the monkeys are not to blame") and #shieldthemonkeys — extended the conversation far beyond the stadium, into the digital medium that gave the campaign its formal classification.
The strategic partnership brought together the credibility of a state health authority and the cultural capital of a beloved sports institution. In Brazil, Ponte Preta is nationally recognised for its monkey mascot, making the club an organically resonant vehicle for this message. The São Paulo State Health Department provided the scientific grounding; Ponte Preta provided the emotional connection and the broadcast platform of live sport. Campinas Municipal Health Department was also named as a partner in the initiative, according to gustavofrison.com.br, giving the campaign local governmental weight alongside its state-level backing. Published formally in May 2018 in Brazil, the campaign comprises a single documented media asset and sits within the sports industry category. Clapboard rates this work 67 out of 100.
A yellow fever outbreak created a genuine public health emergency in Brazil in the years immediately surrounding 2018. According to scielosp.org, yellow fever circulation in Brazil during this period resulted in documented human cases and significant wildlife mortality, with monkeys — particularly howler monkeys — dying in large numbers as sentinel species. The critical scientific fact the campaign sought to communicate is that monkeys do not transmit yellow fever to humans. As established by the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, yellow fever is transmitted to humans exclusively through the bites of infected Aedes or Haemagophilus mosquitoes. Monkeys are victims and biological indicators of the virus's presence, not its vectors. Public misunderstanding of this distinction was leading to the killing of monkeys across Brazil, compounding a wildlife crisis on top of a human health crisis.
Aktuellmix identified Brazilian football's mass cultural reach as the strategic lever capable of shifting this misconception at scale. In Brazil's sports landscape, top-flight football clubs command audience attention that state health communications alone rarely achieve. A study of twenty major Brazilian Championship clubs in 2018 identified two hundred and eighty sponsors operating across those teams, as reported by Scielo Br, illustrating the scale of commercial and public investment flowing through the sport. Ponte Preta's monkey mascot, already embedded in Brazilian football culture, gave the campaign an immediate symbolic shortcut: to protect the mascot was to protect the species.
No direct competitor campaign occupied this precise intersection of wildlife protection, public health, and sports sponsorship activation in Brazil at the same moment. The closest analogues in Brazilian advertising were conventional health authority broadcast campaigns, which lacked the emotional permission that a beloved football club could grant. By choosing the digital medium as its primary channel, Aktuellmix ensured the campaign could travel beyond Campinas and reach the national Brazilian audience that the Copa do Brasil match itself would generate interest from.
The central creative decision of #shieldthemonkeys is an act of subtraction. Ponte Preta removed its own club crest from its match shirts, deploying absence as the campaign's loudest visual statement. In live sport, where kit branding carries significant identity and commercial weight, that removal is immediately legible to any football-literate viewer as something unusual and intentional. The shirt became a canvas for the public health message rather than a vehicle for club identity, an inversion striking enough to generate organic attention without requiring conventional advertising spend.
The bilingual hashtag structure — #aculpanãoédosmacacos in Portuguese and #shieldthemonkeys in English — was itself a creative choice that reflected the campaign's ambition. The Portuguese phrase is direct and exculpatory: the monkeys are not to blame. The English equivalent reframes the same idea as a protective imperative. Together they created a verbal identity robust enough to function across social platforms and national borders, giving the digital campaign linguistic reach beyond Brazil's Portuguese-speaking domestic audience.
Production credits for the #shieldthemonkeys campaign are not fully publicly documented, though Aktuellmix is confirmed as the creating agency across multiple sources including Little Black Book and gustavofrison.com.br. The campaign's single documented media asset is consistent with a tight, message-focused execution rather than a high-production-volume approach. The real production event was the match itself — April 11, 2018, the Copa do Brasil fixture — and the shirts worn on the pitch functioned as live, broadcast-amplified media. The creative economy here is considerable: maximum symbolic impact derived from a material alteration to an existing object, filmed and photographed in conditions of genuine competitive sport, with authentic crowd and broadcast context that no studio recreation could replicate.
No verified independent performance data — such as reach figures, vaccination uptake metrics, or documented reductions in monkey killings attributable to the campaign — is publicly available for #shieldthemonkeys. What the public record does confirm is industry recognition of the work's structural effectiveness. According to Amproawards Com Br, the campaign received a Gold award at the AMPRO Globes Awards in the Best Social, Environmental and Educational Responsibility Project category at the 2018 regional stage, with results reported in 2019. AMPRO is Brazil's leading promotional and experiential marketing industry body, and its Globes Awards represent a rigorous peer assessment of campaign craft and impact in the Brazilian market.
Clapboard rates #shieldthemonkeys 67 out of 100, a score that reflects the campaign's genuine creative ingenuity and strategic clarity alongside the constraints of its single-asset format and the absence of documented measurable outcomes. The campaign earns its score through the elegance of its central mechanic: a sporting institution volunteering to diminish its own visual identity in service of a public health truth. That willingness to subordinate commercial symbolism to civic purpose is strategically rare and creatively disciplined. The digital medium classification means the campaign's effectiveness ultimately rested on social sharing behaviour and the inherent newsworthiness of the crest-removal moment, both of which are difficult to quantify in retrospect without platform data. What the AMPRO Gold confirms is that Brazilian industry peers, reviewing the work in 2019, judged it to have delivered meaningful social value — a qualitative verdict consistent with the campaign's clear communicative ambition.
#shieldthemonkeys was a May 2018 Brazilian digital campaign created by Aktuellmix for Associação Atlética Ponte Preta and the São Paulo State Health Department. It used Ponte Preta's monkey mascot and removed the club's crest from match shirts to fight the myth that monkeys transmit yellow fever, urging vaccination instead.
Ponte Preta removed its crest at the April 11, 2018 Copa do Brasil match against Náutico as the launch moment for #shieldthemonkeys. The removal was a deliberate creative act to signal that the club was prioritising a public health message — defending monkeys wrongly blamed for yellow fever — over its own visual identity.
Aktuellmix created #shieldthemonkeys. The clients were Associação Atlética Ponte Preta and the São Paulo State Health Department, with the Campinas Municipal Health Department also named as a partner, according to gustavofrison.com.br. The campaign was published in Brazil in May 2018 as a digital medium activation within the sports industry.
#shieldthemonkeys won a Gold award at the AMPRO Globes Awards in the Best Social, Environmental and Educational Responsibility Project category at the 2018 regional stage, according to amproawards.com.br. AMPRO is Brazil's leading promotional and experiential marketing body, and results were reported in 2019.
Monkeys do not transmit yellow fever to humans. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, yellow fever passes to humans only through infected mosquito bites. Monkeys are victims and sentinel indicators of the virus. The #shieldthemonkeys campaign in Brazil sought to correct deadly public misinformation driving wildlife persecution.
Clapboard rates #shieldthemonkeys 67 out of 100. The score reflects the campaign's creative discipline and strategic clarity in using a live football moment to deliver a public health message in Brazil, balanced against its single-asset format and the absence of publicly verified performance metrics.
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