Brand activation: why the brand should come second

Anyone thinking about taking a brand to Brazil’s 2027 Carnival is probably already in those conversations, even with the festival still months away. In the last cycle, Ambev opened applications for its street-party sponsorship program on 24 November 2025, almost three months before the parades. These early talks are usually where a brand’s role gets decided, whether it will simply show up or help the party happen.

In August, Vogue Business published a guide to brands at carnivals and street parties and gave the second option a name: brand-second. We found the idea useful for anyone who signs off on sponsorships, because it puts words to something many people in the industry already sensed: a brand tends to be better received when it strengthens what a scene already has before trying to take center stage.

In this article we bring together the case the story used as its example, a Toluna survey on brands at Carnival 2026, what marketing research says about demographics, and what we have seen up close in a business community we work with in Florianópolis, in southern Brazil.

What brand-second means

The term appears in “From Notting Hill to Rio”, the guide Vogue Business published on 26 August 2026. The story spoke to brands, agencies and organizers and landed on a shared point: at festivals with community roots, such as Notting Hill Carnival, Fête de la Musique or Rio’s Carnival, the activations that work best are the ones where the brand arrives knowing the context and with some humility.

Hari Blanch Bennett, a creative strategist at Kantar, summed it up for the story by saying that brands earn their place “by adding to the culture, not borrowing from it”. Sophie Borelly, of research and creative agency On Road, gave examples of what that adding could look like, such as widening young people’s access to sound system culture or creating rest areas for community elders.

In practice, the difference from the sponsorship most people know lies in where the money goes. In the traditional model, the brand pays for exposure, like a logo on the stage, a name on the float or a giveaway in a reveler’s hand. In a brand-second activation, the money goes to something the scene needs, such as sound, infrastructure or artist fees, and the brand accepts a little less visibility in return for a warmer welcome.

The Havaianas and NTS case in Paris

The story’s example with numbers took place in Paris, at the Fête de la Musique on 21 June 2026. London radio station NTS teamed up with Havaianas on a free party with Brazilian music sets, part of the O Brasil de Havaianas series. The setup was very simple, a roofless kombi van, with no brand bar and no sandal customization.

Havaianas expected a thousand people. According to Laure Martinez, the company’s brand marketing director for Europe, more than 6,000 came, and many stayed for over six hours. The indicators the brand had agreed on beforehand were people arriving on their own, the queue and a crowd that didn’t leave. On social media, the activation reached a 7% engagement rate across Instagram, TikTok and Facebook.

William Dickson, head of marketing at NTS, explained that the programming was built around sub-communities, scenes and behaviors rather than a target audience defined in advance. The station wanted to avoid a line-up that felt engineered for a consumer profile. For him, what happens on the ground counts more than the digital reach numbers that come afterwards.

How the Brazilian public responds

Toluna surveyed 1,018 Brazilians on 7 and 8 February 2026, just before Carnival. Seventy-one percent said they value brands that support the festival, but only 41% saw it as positive when companies use Carnival as a theme in their advertising. Thirty percent pointed out that, without sponsorship, many of these events wouldn’t happen at all.

These are different questions, so the numbers can’t be read as one scale. Even so, the 30-point gap offers a hint that people tend to give more credit to whoever helps the party get off the ground. The same survey shows that 65% of revelers were heading to free street parties and floats, which are usually the ones that rely most on sponsorship to pay for sound trucks and infrastructure.

In Brazil, the closest recent case to this logic is Ambev’s program for the 2026 Carnival. The brewer set aside R$ 4 million for up to 250 street parties in Rio and São Paulo, with R$ 10,000 for groups of up to 5,000 revelers and R$ 20,000 for those of up to 20,000. The money was paid before Carnival, with no financial reporting required.

It would be a stretch to call the program pure brand-second, since each group carries the brand’s banner, mentions the sponsorship on the microphone and grants exclusivity in the beverage category. What stands out is the order of things, as the money reaches the street party before the festival and visibility comes later. In 2024, Ambev had also invested R$ 20 million to support street vendors and recycling collectors.

Why demographics explain so little

NTS and the story both note that a description like “women aged 25 to 34, middle class” says little about a scene. Marketing research has been pointing to something similar for quite some time. The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, at the University of South Australia, compared the profiles of people who buy competing brands and found them to be very similar.

Malcolm Uncles and colleagues analyzed 50 categories over 25 years and published the results in the Journal of Advertising Research in 2012. In 2017, Zachary Anesbury, Margaret Winchester and Rachel Kennedy reached a similar conclusion looking at 700 brands, in a study in Marketing Letters. In both cases, age, income and gender did little to tell one brand’s customers apart from a competitor’s.

It’s worth saying that these studies deal with demographics and go no further. The idea that the scene explains more is our own reading, and Ehrenberg-Bass itself usually argues for broad reach. What the research gives us is a good reason to be wary of the demographic profile and to look at what people do together, the groups Douglas Holt called crowdcultures in a 2016 Harvard Business Review article.

What we saw inside a community

Headcore runs the content for BBL (Business, Beer & Lifestyle), a club of entrepreneurs, executives and investors in Florianópolis founded by Cristiano Haubrich and Rodrigo Dantas, who are also partners at Headcore. In September 2026, BBL had 315 members and 38 deals mapped among them, adding up to R$ 31.6 million, according to the club’s internal tracking.

Between April and October 2025, 29 members answered a satisfaction survey, and the average score was 9.3 out of 10. Twelve said they had already done business through the group, three completed and nine in progress, and eight reported deals worth over R$ 1 million. There was a bit of everything, from buying land for a development to selling services and partnerships in construction.

For anyone thinking about sponsoring a community like this, the most interesting answer was about what members value most. Networking came up in 25 of the 29 answers, new friendships and sports partnerships in 22 and the relaxed atmosphere in 20, while business generation got 13. When we asked what they would like to get from the club, only 5 chose “space to present your company”.

Eighteen of the 29 are between 36 and 45, a fact that would fit neatly on a target audience sheet. But all 29 named at least one sport, with weight training (19) and surfing (17) in the lead, and that shared interest shows up again when they talk about what they value. For a brand sponsoring BBL, this suggests that showing off a product interests few people, while supporting the morning run or surf session speaks to most of them.

How to decide on a brand activation

When assessing a proposal, four questions have been helping us talk this through with our branding clients:

1. What does the scene already have, and what is it missing? At Fête de la Musique, a free stage for Brazilian music was missing, and small street parties often lack money for sound trucks and restrooms. The people best placed to answer are the ones who organize the event, so it pays to talk to them before closing the brief.
2. Who decides the programming? When the brand alone picks artists, times and running order, the activation tends to start from the target audience. In Paris, NTS built the line-up around the scene and Havaianas came in afterwards.
3. How much of the budget stays with the people who make the party? In Ambev’s program that’s easy to see, since the R$ 4 million went to the street parties. In other activations, it helps to separate what pays for the brand’s own setup from what pays for artists, local production and services for the public.
4. What is better once the brand leaves? It could be the sound equipment that stays with the group after Carnival, or the collective that now has a regular schedule. When the only possible answer is “brand recall“, the activation may still sit closer to traditional sponsorship.

How to measure it

Havaianas tracked the spontaneous queue and how long people stayed, and NTS gave more weight to on-site presence than to digital reach. These are behavioral indicators, and they tell a little more about how the public received the brand than a count of paid impressions.

Kantar also suggests care with the content published after the event, crediting the artists, showing real participants and avoiding the highlight reel that looks like a campaign. According to Bennett, in these free spaces any hint of extraction tends to be called out quickly, and criticism travels faster than praise.

At our Intelligence Unit, our hypothesis is that impact left behind will gain space in sponsorship reports, alongside reach and engagement. It would mean measuring how much money reached the scene and whether the community invites the brand back the following year. As far as we could find, there is still no standard way to measure this.

Limits of the data

The Havaianas numbers were reported by the brand itself to Vogue Business, with no external audit, and the story gives no benchmark for the 7% engagement rate. The Toluna survey is an online panel, and Meio & Mensagem did not publish the exact wording of the questions.

The BBL survey is from 2025, has 29 responses and was answered by people who already take part in the club, which tends to push the score up. The 38 deals and R$ 31.6 million come from BBL’s internal tracking. And the Ehrenberg-Bass studies deal with the profiles of buyers of competing brands, not with cultural events.

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