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Sport Club Internacional Walks Rival Fans to Peace in 2015
Sport Club Internacional's "Side by Side" is a 2015 ambient campaign launched in Brazil that invited supporters of opposing football clubs to walk approximately one kilometer together to the stadium and sit beside each other during the match, with the stated purpose of humanising rival fans and reducing football-related hostility.
Published in June 2015, the campaign operates within the Recreation and Leisure category and was executed through ambient advertising — a medium that places creative work directly within lived environments rather than on conventional paid media channels. In Brazil, where football rivalry forms a core part of civic and cultural identity, the choice of format was deliberate: by inserting the campaign into the physical act of attending a match, Sport Club Internacional made the experience itself the message. The club is based in Porto Alegre, where its rivalry with Grêmio Foot-Ball Porto Alegrense — known as the Grenal — is among the most intense and historically charged fixtures in South American football, as noted in archived records across latinspots.com and En Wikipedia.
The campaign archives a single media asset, reflecting the spare, experience-first logic of ambient work: the documentation serves as evidence of the encounter rather than the primary vehicle of communication. "Side by Side" earned a Bronze Lion in the Public Relations category at the Cannes Lions 2015 festival, according to publicly available awards records, placing it among the recognised social-purpose campaigns of that competitive year. The Clapboard Score for this campaign is 64 out of 100. The campaign's objectives — reducing hostility between rival supporters and fostering direct human contact across tribal lines — align it with a broader tradition of sports clubs using their cultural authority to address social tensions in Brazil and across the region.
Sport Club Internacional identified a specific social friction as its strategic entry point. Football-related hostility between rival supporter groups is a documented and recurring issue in Brazilian football culture, and the Grenal — the fixture between Internacional and Grêmio — carries particular intensity in Porto Alegre, as recorded across en.wikipedia.org and latinspots.com. Rather than address this tension through broadcast messaging, the campaign's strategic logic rested on direct contact theory: the proposition that sustained, structured interaction between members of opposing groups reduces prejudice and antagonism more reliably than communication alone.
The ambient format was essential to this strategy. By situating the experience within the authentic context of match attendance — the walk, the approach to the stadium, the seat — "Side by Side" avoided the abstraction of a television or digital appeal. The campaign asked participants to perform a small but symbolically weighted act: choosing proximity over distance. As reported by trendhunter.com, the initiative drew attention precisely because it embedded its social argument inside the football ritual rather than alongside it.
In the broader competitive landscape of Brazilian football marketing, clubs such as Grêmio and Flamengo have historically invested in campaigns that celebrate supporter identity and club heritage. Sport Club Internacional's approach in 2015 diverged from that convention by directing creative energy toward the relationship between rival supporters rather than the internal solidarity of its own fanbase. Globally, sports sponsorship was projected to reach approximately 45.3 billion US dollars in 2015, representing a compound annual growth rate of 5.3 percent from 2010 levels, according to Sponsorship — a market context that underscores the growing commercial and reputational stakes attached to how football clubs position themselves publicly.
Production credits for "Side by Side" are not publicly documented. No director, creative director, photographer, or production company is identified in available records for this campaign, and the agency responsible has not been publicly disclosed, as confirmed by clapboard.com's archive listing.
What the available record does establish is the campaign's creative architecture, which is itself the primary act of craft. The narrative structure of "Side by Side" is experiential and sequential: a supporter of one club is paired with a supporter of the opposing club, they walk approximately one kilometer together toward the stadium, and they sit beside each other during the match. Each stage of that sequence is both logistically real and symbolically freighted. The walk is not incidental; it is the duration in which the human encounter occurs before the tribal context of the game reasserts itself. The seat beside the rival is not a stunt placement but a reframing of what the football stadium, as a shared civic space, can hold.
As an ambient campaign, "Side by Side" relies on its participants as both audience and medium. The campaign does not describe an experience; it creates one. This is consistent with the most effective ambient work produced in Brazil and internationally during the mid-2010s, a period in which cause-adjacent sports marketing was gaining traction as a creative and strategic category. The single archived media asset functions as documentation — a record of the encounter that allows the campaign to circulate beyond its immediate participants. The restraint of that single asset reflects a confident creative position: the work does not need extensive production to make its argument because the argument was made in the street, on foot, before a ball was kicked.
No verified performance data for "Side by Side" is publicly available. No figures for participation rates, attendance impact, brand tracking movement, or media reach have been published in accessible sources, and no media or production budget has been disclosed, as confirmed by clapboard.com's archive records.
The campaign's most concrete external validation is its Bronze Lion in the Public Relations category at Cannes Lions 2015, according to publicly available festival records. That recognition places "Side by Side" within the judged output of one of the most scrutinised creative festivals in the global advertising industry, and the Public Relations category specifically rewards work that shifts perception or behaviour through earned engagement rather than paid placement — a structurally appropriate category for a campaign whose mechanism depended entirely on the willingness of real people to participate.
Structurally, the campaign demonstrates several characteristics associated with durable ambient work. Its concept is transferable across fixture occasions without loss of meaning. Its social purpose — reducing football-related hostility in Brazil — connects to a genuinely documented cultural tension rather than a manufactured one. And its reliance on participant experience rather than media spend means that its communicative value scales with organic reach rather than budget. The Clapboard Score of 64 out of 100 reflects a campaign that is conceptually coherent and culturally grounded but limited in documented impact and production transparency — a profile consistent with ambient work from this period where execution was privileged over measurement infrastructure.
Side by Side was an ambient advertising campaign launched by Sport Club Internacional in Brazil in June 2015. It invited supporters of rival football clubs to walk approximately one kilometer together to the stadium and sit beside each other during the match, with the goal of reducing football-related hostility between opposing fans.
Side by Side won a Bronze Lion at Cannes Lions 2015 in the Public Relations category, according to publicly available festival records. The Public Relations category recognises work that shifts perception or behaviour through earned engagement, making it a structurally appropriate fit for a campaign built around direct participant experience rather than paid media.
The campaign addressed the Grenal rivalry between Sport Club Internacional and Grêmio Foot-Ball Porto Alegrense in Porto Alegre, Brazil. The Grenal is among the most intense fixtures in South American football, as documented by en.wikipedia.org and latinspots.com, making it a high-stakes cultural context for a campaign about reducing supporter hostility.
The agency behind Side by Side has not been publicly disclosed, and production credits including director and creative director are not documented in available records, as confirmed by clapboard.com. The campaign was created for Sport Club Internacional and published in Brazil in June 2015 as an ambient work in the Recreation and Leisure category.
Sport Club Internacional's Side by Side holds a Clapboard Score of 64 out of 100. The score reflects a campaign that is conceptually coherent and culturally grounded in the Brazilian football context but is limited by the absence of documented performance data and undisclosed production credits, which reduce its scoreable transparency.
Sport Club Internacional used ambient advertising because the campaign's social argument required a real, embodied encounter rather than a mediated message. By placing the experience inside the act of attending a match — the walk, the seat beside a rival — the campaign embedded its case for reducing football-related hostility in Brazil directly within the ritual it sought to change.
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