How SBT and Publicis Turned YouTube Skip Into a Troll Ad Button
The Noite Troll Ad Button is a 2016 digital campaign created by Publicis Brasil for Brazilian free-to-air broadcaster SBT, promoting the return of late-night comedy talk show The Noite com Danilo Gentili by replacing the standard YouTube Skip Ad option with a custom Troll Ad interaction that triggered prank footage of the show's host and cast, according to Meioemensagem Com Br.
Publicis launched the campaign in Brazil on March 2–3, 2016, according to Meio e Mensagem and corroborated by Clapboard's own archive records. The campaign's central mechanic was elegantly simple: viewers watching YouTube pre-roll advertisements encountered a button labelled Trolar Anúncio — Portuguese for Troll Ad — in place of the familiar Skip Ad option. Selecting it did not bypass the advertisement but instead activated comic scenarios in which the show's ensemble turned the tables on host Danilo Gentili, subjecting him to stunts including a paint bath and a collision orchestrated by cast member Diguinho Coruja dressed as a sumo wrestler. The format made the advertising unit itself the entertainment, dissolving the boundary between promotional content and the comedic identity of The Noite, according to Telaviva Com Br.
In the Brazilian market, where audience attention during pre-roll advertising was a persistent challenge for broadcasters, the campaign arrived at a moment of significant digital expansion, according to Reutersinstitute Politics Ox Ac Uk. The campaign featured not only Gentili but also comedians Léo Lins and Murilo Couto, presenter Juliana Oliveira, Diguinho Coruja, and veteran rock band Ultraje a Rigor, giving it the scale and star power of a broadcast event compressed into a digital format. The Clapboard Score for this campaign is 63 out of 100, reflecting a strong conceptual premise and culturally fluent execution that nevertheless remains difficult to fully assess without verified performance data in the public domain.
Publicis Brasil identified a structural tension in the Brazilian digital advertising market and built the entire campaign around resolving it. The insight was direct: YouTube pre-roll is the format audiences are most conditioned to dismiss, and for a comedy show whose entire brand rests on irreverence and surprise, that conditioned dismissal was the creative opportunity.
The broader market context gave the strategy urgency. Online advertising investment in Brazil rose by a substantial margin in 2016, and online video advertising specifically increased by a remarkable degree year over year, according to data cited by Academia Edu drawing on Brazilian advertising industry research. That expansion meant competition for viewer attention on digital video platforms was intensifying precisely as SBT needed to announce the return of The Noite. Free-to-air television, SBT's primary distribution platform, captured the largest share of total advertising investment in Brazil that year, according to research published by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism — but digital was where the audience growth was occurring, and the campaign had to perform in both registers simultaneously.
SBT's principal broadcast competitors in Brazil include Globo, which has historically commanded the dominant share of free-to-air audience ratings, and Record TV, which competes directly for the audience segment SBT targets. Against those rivals, a standard pre-roll buy would have registered as noise. By engineering the ad unit itself as a prank — coherent with The Noite's on-screen personality — Publicis gave SBT a piece of content that could circulate beyond paid placements and function as earned media within the very demographic the show sought to re-engage. The sustained agency relationship between Publicis and SBT, documented across campaigns in 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016 per Clapboard's editorial archive, suggests a working partnership with enough institutional knowledge of the brand to take that structural risk, according to Sunmatrix.
The Noite Troll Ad Button campaign rests on a single creative decision that required precise production execution to land correctly. Publicis Brasil engineered a custom YouTube pre-roll interaction in which the conventional Skip Ad button was replaced by a Trolar Anúncio button, and the footage triggered by that selection had to feel genuinely spontaneous rather than staged — a difficult balance when the entire cast and production crew were necessarily involved in the shoot.
The documented prank scenarios required physical choreography and tight editorial control. Danilo Gentili receiving a paint bath and being charged by Diguinho Coruja in a sumo costume are physical gags that depend on timing, camera placement, and Gentili's own unscripted reaction to sell the authenticity that the campaign's premise demands. The inclusion of Léo Lins, Murilo Couto, Juliana Oliveira, and Ultraje a Rigor expanded the scope of the production beyond a simple host-centric stunt, signalling that the Troll Ad concept was ambitious enough to function as a mini-production rather than a repurposed clip.
Production credits for the Troll Ad Button campaign beyond the confirmed agency attribution to Publicis Brasil are not fully documented in publicly available sources, and no individual creative director, director, or photographer is named in the materials indexed by Clapboard or reported by Meio e Mensagem. What is documentable is the platform engineering component: replacing a native YouTube interface element with a branded custom interaction required co-ordination with YouTube's ad serving infrastructure, adding a layer of technical production to what was also a comedic performance exercise. The result was a format that collapsed the distance between advertisement and entertainment — a creative ambition that defined the campaign's identity in the Brazilian digital media landscape of 2016.
No verified performance data for The Noite Troll Ad Button campaign is publicly available. Meio e Mensagem covered the campaign's launch in March 2016, and Clapboard's archive documents its existence as a single digital media asset, but click-through rates, view counts, earned media reach, or any subsequent ratings uplift for The Noite com Danilo Gentili have not been disclosed in sources available for attribution.
Structural analysis supports a cautiously optimistic reading of the campaign's effectiveness. The Troll Ad mechanic directly addressed what is typically the weakest moment in pre-roll advertising — the Skip Ad prompt — and converted it into a moment of brand-consistent interaction. For an audience already familiar with Danilo Gentili's persona, selecting Trolar Anúncio was an act of participation rather than avoidance, which repositioned the viewer's relationship to the advertisement before a single second of conventional promotional content had played. In a Brazilian digital video market that was expanding rapidly in 2016, according to data cited by Academia.edu, that kind of format innovation carried disproportionate visibility relative to its production scale.
The campaign also benefited from the coherence between its medium and its message. A late-night comedy show promoting itself through a prank directed at its own host is a structurally sound creative argument. Whether that argument translated into measurable audience return for The Noite's new episode run remains unverifiable from publicly available sources. The Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100 reflects the campaign's conceptual strength and formal originality, tempered by the absence of documented outcomes and the inherent difficulty of sustaining novelty in a format that relies on the element of surprise.
The Troll Ad Button was a 2016 digital campaign by Publicis Brasil for SBT. It replaced YouTube's standard Skip Ad option with a Trolar Anúncio button that triggered prank footage starring Danilo Gentili and the full cast of The Noite com Danilo Gentili, promoting the show's return with new episodes.
Publicis launched the campaign in Brazil on March 2–3, 2016, according to Meio e Mensagem. Clapboard's archive metadata references July 2016, creating a documented date discrepancy, though March 2–3 is the date supported by contemporaneous Brazilian trade press coverage of the campaign's release.
The campaign featured host Danilo Gentili as its central subject alongside comedians Léo Lins and Murilo Couto, presenter Juliana Oliveira, cast member Diguinho Coruja, and Brazilian rock band Ultraje a Rigor. Gentili was the target of the pranks, including a paint bath and a sumo-costume charge by Diguinho Coruja.
Publicis replaced YouTube's native Skip Ad button with a custom Trolar Anúncio option. Viewers who selected it did not skip the advertisement but instead triggered comic prank footage involving The Noite's cast. The mechanic converted the typical avoidance moment of pre-roll advertising into an act of brand-consistent audience participation.
SBT competed primarily against Globo, Brazil's dominant free-to-air broadcaster, and Record TV in the Brazilian entertainment market. Online video advertising in Brazil was growing sharply in 2016, according to research cited by Academia.edu, making digital format innovation a meaningful differentiator for a broadcaster seeking to re-engage audiences beyond traditional television.
Clapboard assigns The Noite Troll Ad Button a score of 63 out of 100. The score reflects the campaign's strong conceptual premise and its formal originality in repurposing YouTube's ad interface as a comedy delivery mechanism, tempered by the absence of publicly verified performance metrics and the single-asset scale of the execution.
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