Brazilian teen magazine Capricho had successfully dabbled with web-based programming and social media initiatives to engage with its teenage girl audience.
Based on its success of working with, and even creating Brazilian celebrities, Capricho wanted to find a way to connect all of its previous forays outside the traditional publishing model into one, all encompassing transmedia project.
In order to establish a successful brand in the teen universe, it is essential that teen girls feel they are connected to their idols. Capricho realised the best way to do this was to allow readers to create their own idols.
Capricho had already had some success with creating new "teen idols" with the online community that had grown around a blog written by a group of teenage boys (Vida de Garoto), who had become online celebrities to their teenage girl audience. Three of the boys writing the blog have in excess of 460,000 followers each on Twitter.
Capricho launched a campaign to search for the most handsome, coolest boy who would become the new teen idol for the typical Brazilian teenage girl. Colírios translates directly as "eyedrops" - a similar phrase in English would be "eye candy".
The multi-platform activity saw Capricho Colírios appear in the magazine itself, MTV Brazil, a dedicated website, a mobile platform and on popular social networks.
From April, any boy could join the contest by registering on the colirioscapricho.com.br site. Capricho readers would then vote for the most popular profiles. The top 100 boys were then invited to post a video about themselves to the site, to be judged by a panel from Capricho and MTV Brazil.
The resulting finalists were the stars of a seven-week TV show on MTV Brazil, in which the boys took part in various challenges. One by one the contestants were eliminated, until a grand final in which the new Colírio was presented to an eager audience. The winner, Renan Grassi became the cover star for an issue of the magazine, and joined the MTV Brazil team as a guest reporter. He also became one of the contributors to the popular Vida de Garoto boy blog.
Results
The Colírios TV show reached more than 700,000 teenagers in the target 15-19 age bracket. There were 3,500 spectators at the final.
In the first round of the competition 93,000 boys received a combined total of 17 million votes. The voting site attracted 77million page views, from 3.6 million unique users.
Traffic to the magazine website also increased significantly during 2010, which saw 4.2 million unique visitors compared to less than a million in 2008.