NAt the end of 2022, while leading the government transition in Brasília, Lula invited Sidônio Palmeira to the position of minister of the Secretariat of Social Communication (Secom) of the Presidency of the Republic. The conversation took place at the Meliá Brasil 21 hotel, where the president-elect was staying. Sidônio thanked him, but refused. Two years later, with Paulo Pimenta wearing out, Lula repeated the invitation. This time, the marketer accepted, but set conditions. One of them was the autonomy to dismiss members of the previous management and form their own team. Another was an increase in Secom’s budget, which, in his opinion, was insufficient to cover the entire government.
Today, Sidônio has around 1 billion reais at his disposal. The value is 60% higher than what Pimenta had last year. The bulk of the money goes, as it always has, to advertising campaigns, which are expensive. As determined by the minister, at least 30% of what is spent on these campaigns has been directed to the internet (the average was 20% until then). This year’s partial data shows that Secom concentrated ads on a smaller number of sites and platforms, but increased the money invested in each of them, especially in big techs. Google, which last year received 9.5 million reais to run government advertisements, this year had already pocketed more than 36 million reais by mid-November. The company runs YouTube, an important platform for government communications. Spending on Meta, which manages Instagram and Facebook, jumped from 20 million reais to 32.9 million in the same period.
The digital strategy implemented by Sidônio involves, to a large extent, boosting posts on social networks, repeating what he did in Lula’s campaign in 2022. Meta’s ad library informs that, from August to November this year, Secom spent 17.6 million reais sponsoring posts on Facebook and Instagram. It is a large amount, considering that, in the entire previous period, from 2020 to 2025, 36.8 million reais had been paid. In other words: in just three months, Sidônio spent half of what the government had spent over five years on advertising on these platforms.
“Secom’s organizational design was not ready for a digital dispute”, says Tiago César dos Santos, executive secretary of Secom, in a report published in this month’s edition of Piauí. It’s true: the tender that Secom recently concluded for contracting digital content was the first of its kind, as the secretariat’s classic structure was made up only of the advertising and press areas. The Secretariat of Strategies and Networks was only created in the second year of Pimenta’s administration. Today, it is fundamental to Secom’s work. It is through networks that the government can position itself quickly.
In October, for example, the day after the biggest killing in Rio de Janeiro’s police history, Secom published a video giving the government’s tone: it condemned organized crime, but said that the massacre did not help anything and defended the approval of the Public Security PEC. The secretariat spent more than 1 million reais to promote the video on Instagram, where it received around 100 million views. It was a case celebrated internally. “To put an advertising campaign on the streets you need fifteen to twenty days, due to the duration of the bureaucratic process”, says Tiago César. “The structuring of this digital work allows us to be a little more guided and not be so guided.”
The volume of posts is expected to grow in 2026, when the three agencies hired to take care of digital communication – Brivia, Binder and BKR – come into action. The tender foresees that they will annually provide 3,000 videos, 1,000 illustrations, banners and infographics, 156 podcast episodes and so on. The three will share a budget of 98 million reais.
Sidônio took over Secom in January 2025 and agreed with Lula that he would stay in the position for just one year. So far, it is unclear whether the agreement still stands. Read here the full report.