Mercado Livre’s Anniversary Ad is the Complete Package
Mercado Livre
Little Boxes
Retail brands love to celebrate anniversaries in their ads, and for an e-commerce and auction site like Argentina’s Mercado Livre, 25 years in the game is an impressive milestone. From the dial-up to the smartphone eras, the brand has been Latin America’s e-commerce market leader and its anniversary campaign created by agency GUT is being rolled out across the whole of the region – this Test Your Ad result is from Brazil.
The ad doesn’t try to take us back to the 90s, though, or lean on nostalgia at all. Instead it focuses on charm, with animated characters, and the central benefit of e-commerce – delivery of what you need, when you need it, to your door. A universal benefit is the right choice for an ad designed to play across multiple markets, and an animated character is also an element well chosen for broad appeal.
In Mercado Livre’s case the characters are walking parcels, whose journey takes them from a warehouse, along conveyor belts, onto container ships and through city and countryside. There are multiple parcels, and part of the fun in the ad is working out what each package might contain from the animated feet we see – clown shoes, videogame character feet, a bouncing ball, and monstrous furry claws. The ad starts and ends with the ‘monster’ package and we close with a child opening the parcel to find a picture book starring the monster itself.
It’s a delightful ad which really gets across the challenges of delivering packages efficiently across a region of such vast area and geographical variety. Making logistics entertaining is not an easy task for a commercial, but Mercado Livre’s walking parcels manage it. The soundtrack, a modern cover of classic 60s tune “Little Boxes”, is a huge help – it’s melodic, catchy and lyrically appropriate. The brand should be happy with the key associations consumers have with the ad – “Delivery”, “Efficiency” and “Agility” are the Top 3, with all three scoring very strongly positive. It shows the ad’s message is being fully understood.
The ad also scores well on Test Your Ad’s Star Rating prediction of long-term growth – an impressive 4.4-Stars suggesting strong potential for market share gain. And it gets a Strong score on the short-term Spike Rating which predicts immediate sales potential. Where it really excels, though, is on Brand Fluency – a maximum 100% score; absolutely everyone who sees the ad recognizes that it’s for Mercado Livre.
That’s a rare feat, and reflects the brand’s very strong position in Latin American markets. But it’s also a testament to how well the ad itself is branded, with immediate mention of the brand and the logo prominent throughout on the animated parcels. One lesson from the ad is that animated characters can often incorporate brand assets in ways which raise recognition as well as positive response.