Mercado Libre Excels With Powerful Mother’s Day Storytelling

Brazil has just celebrated Mother’s Day, and e-commerce site Mercado Libre joined in the festivities with this month’s LATAM Ad Of The Month, an emotional, narrative-driven spot which takes a look at both new and old motherhood.

Like many powerful campaigns, the ad – developed with GUT Agency – is based on a simple human truth: every mother is also a daughter. The ad is filmed from the point-of-view perspective of a pregnant woman as she becomes a new mother. Medical staff, relatives and friends all rush around and their attention is firmly on the new baby, with one exception. In the emotional tumult, her own mother is there to give the new mom the support she needs as she begins her parental journey.

That’s not the only journey here. The ad is a beautiful example of how to construct an emotional journey in a short space of time, with help from a gentle acoustic cover version of 80s pop classic “Take On Me”. If you look at the emotional trace in the Test Your Ad Pro report, you’ll see a clear emotional arc take shape, with a spike of fear as the protagonist goes into labor and rushes to hospital, followed by a surge of happiness as the baby is born. This rise in happiness primes the audience for the real climax of the ad – her own mother’s emotional response and their embrace.

A first-person point of view can be a difficult thing to pull off well in an ad. It creates immediacy and strong viewer identification, but it means you can only see the responses of other characters to the protagonist. That can make it harder to put across the between-ness and human connection that an emotional ad needs. But birth is such a powerful experience that even those who haven’t experienced it can understand and respond to the feelings on display here.

Mercado Libre and GUT have chosen here to show the drama of birth as well as the happy emotions. Rather than cut away to a happy resting newborn, they’ve shown the child in its first seconds, crying while everyone around it races to help. This is a bold choice, and it pays off when you look at the ad’s Emotional Intensity score, well above the Brazilian average. The intensity of emotion helps drive a strong short-term Spike Rating, which predicts the potential for sales gains. Fluency – rapid brand recognition – is also strong.

The ad also has powerful long-term potential, with a 4.6-Star Rating, high above the Brazilian average of 2.7-Stars. It achieves this with a huge 73% of viewers feeling happiness. It’s more proof that by telling a powerful story and going all out for emotion, Mercado Libre have made an ad that speaks effectively to mothers and beyond.