Burger King and Serasa offer free burgers to Brazilians who check their credit score

Burger King and Serasa have teamed up on a Halloween campaign in Brazil that presents checking a credit score as more frightening than any monster.

On 30 October, customers who open the Serasa app and show their score at a participating Burger King drive-thru can claim a Cheddar Jr or Chicken Jr free of charge.

The film, ‘Who’s Afraid of Their Credit Score?’, opens late at night in an underground car park. A man wanders through whistling, unmoved by a screeching cat knocking a bin lid over or by a pale-faced ghoul who rushes up behind him and roars. He simply smiles, and she gives up. Only when she holds out a glowing phone does he scream, horrified at the prospect of looking at his credit score.

What follows is a rapid run through horror conventions. One creature bursts out of his computer screen, another emerges from a sewer and a witch swoops at him on a broomstick. A crowd of monsters, each holding a lit screen, chases him to his car, where a grinning creature presses an oversized phone against the windscreen as the app’s home page appears. “Check your score,” it tells him.

The ordeal ends at a Burger King drive-thru. The attendant is unimpressed by the commotion, and the monsters are now standing about calmly with drinks.

Confronting a financial fear

The Serasa Score rates consumers between 0 and 1,000 and is Brazil’s best-known credit indicator. Serasa’s creative and strategy director, Renan Maximiano, said many people avoid checking it because they are afraid of the result.

“Instead of using Halloween simply as a seasonal theme, we used it as a lens to explore a real tension: the anxiety many people feel about their financial reputation,” he said. “By turning fears around the Serasa Score into entertaining and educational stories, we created relevance, sparked conversation and helped demystify one of the most important financial indicators in Brazilians’ daily lives.”

The two brands may seem an unlikely match, but Maximiano said the partnership “quickly proved that the two brands could create highly relevant cultural conversations together.” Burger King has a name for engaging consumers through humour and cultural moments, while Serasa has been repositioning itself as a more accessible brand rather than a conventional credit bureau.

“Halloween became the perfect territory because it allowed us to connect Burger King’s playful relationship with fear and horror to a very real fear that many Brazilians have: confronting their financial situation,” he added.

Oliver Latin America worked on the film, which Luiz Whately of Balma Films directed. It is packed with horror-film references, down to the jagged lettering used for the burger names.

Customers only have to show their score to the attendant. Nothing is photographed or stored, and the score is not linked to the order. Maximiano described the burger as a nudge: “The promotion is ultimately a means to encourage a positive financial behaviour: checking and understanding your score. The objective is to make that first step feel less intimidating and show that accessing financial information doesn’t need to be a stressful experience.”

The idea is rooted in local attitudes to debt. In Brazil, someone with a bad credit record is said to have a ‘nome sujo’, or ‘dirty name’, and the campaign sets that source of embarrassment against a free burger and a monster-movie spoof.

Following last year’s overdue-bill offer

Last year’s campaign offered a free burger to drive-thru customers who presented an overdue bill. In a single day it generated 233,000 app downloads and more than 177,000 sandwich redemptions, and Maximiano said it was Burger King’s biggest drive-thru activation anywhere in the world.

The takeaway, he said, was that people react well when the subject of money is handled “with self-awareness and humour rather than fear or lecturing.”

Oliver Latin America’s team included chief executive Luis Constantino and executive creative director Rodrigo Esteves. Balma Films produced the film, with post-production by Donmar Post and audio by Berimbau Audio Studio.