Through extensive data utilization, we creatively transformed the user experience on Black Friday, intersecting the programming database of the world's second-largest TV network with Latin America's largest e-commerce platform's offers. This innovative approach surpassed typical retail campaign outcomes, offering exclusive deals tailored to each attraction. Football match? Sports equipment deals. Cooking shows? Refrigerators, pots, and related items. Departing from competitive ad breaks, we gamified the shopping experience, ensuring a unique user journey.

Black Friday stands out as the retail event with the highest sales volume of the year. A survey by Octadesk, indicates that 73% of Brazilians prefer online shopping, especially drawn by the classics discounts. According to Conversion, 90.5% of the population intending to make purchases on the period – marking a 9% increase from the previous year. However, all the brands advertise their traditional discounts in the same way: in TV breaks. Why? TV is the medium with biggest fight penetration among the Brazilian population, far ahead from any other. This generates a real fight for the consumers' attention. On one hand, there are hundreds of brands competing for limited TV ad breaks, offering discounts and terribly similar ads; on the other, at least half of consumers believe that there is a lack of real offers on the date. To make matters worse, although Mercado Libre is the category leader, it is still not recognized for offering the best discounts and is also very little associated to Black Friday. Purchase consideration rates on the platform generally fall in the period, placing it below competitors such as Shopee and Shein. If the brand wanted to be successful on Black Friday, it would need to break the logic of the category in order to stand out.

Black Friday is the peak shopping of the year in Brazil. Consumers are most ready to open their wallets. However, standing out during this event is challenging due to three main reasons:

(1) TV is the most popular medium and advertising slots are fiercely competed over not just by the usual discount-heavy competitors but also by lesser-known brands aiming for a slice of the pie.

(2) Most of these brands are doing pretty much the same: huge fonts, urgent voiceovers, loud sounds to grab attention, promoting ""unmissable"" deals that often leave consumers skeptical.

(3) Despite being the biggest ecommerce in Latin America, Mercado Livre was not associated to promotions an huge discounts.

To break through this clutter, it was necessary to change Mercado Livre's approach and meet our business and branding goals: drive more traffic to our website and app, increase sales during the period, and become a top-of-mind brand."

Instead of competing for space during crowded ad breaks, we took a unique approach with our "brand-promo-content." We noticed that handshakes—featured in Mercado Libre's logo—appear frequently across TV shows. So, we tracked the data over 2,000 of these handshakes during programming on Brazil's largest TV channel, TV Globo, and paired each one with exclusive QR codes. When viewers scanned these QR codes, they unlocked discount coupons. That's right, every handshake was a chance to snag an unbeatable deal. A handshake in a soap opera? Discount. On the morning show? Discount. During the news? Discount.

To keep the excitement going for 45 straight days, the coupons improved as Black Friday approached. The real thrill came with offering these discount coupons at unexpected moments for a very limited time, creating a rush every time a coupon was released.

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In our campaign, we gathered three distinct types of data:

Behavioral Data: gathered from research, news sources, and internal analysis. It revealed key insights, such as the ineffectiveness of traditional TV ad breaks, a growing consumer skepticism towards period-specific discounts, and the critical importance of TV audience for achieving results.

Audience Data: helped us refine our media strategy by identifying the optimal times when the largest TV audiences were available and engaged.

Broadcaster Programming Database: This tool, augmented by artificial intelligence, was essential in the strategic execution of our campaign. It enabled us to identify handshakes in scenes that had already been recorded or were planned in scripts.

We cross-referenced all these data sets with Mercado Livre's own database to align our strategy with the brands most compelling Black Friday offers. This integration helped us identify potential interest matches among consumers, enhancing the overall effectiveness of our business strategy.

The work relied on the use of data at basically every stage of the process. From the moment of mapping handshakes, when with the help of an AI we used the broadcaster's programation database to find handshakes in scenes already recorded, as well as possible handshakes predicted in the script. We cross-referenced all this data with the Black Friday offers database from Mercado Livre, finding potential matches of interest. And finally, we programmed the entry of these handshakes at the right moments and in the right programs, according to insights gained from the audience.

Despite the market experiencing one of its worst Black Fridays in Brazilian history, Handshake Hunt campaign turned out to be the best Black Friday in Mercado Livre's history. The data-driven campaign reached 80 million people and achieved 7.8 billion impressions. It significantly boosted Mercado Libre's brand presence, with a 5p.p. increase in top-of-mind awareness, giving the brand the first place in its category. Additionally, brand consideration grew 7p.p compared to the previous year.

The data-approach strategy also drove a remarkable 14% increase in app and website sessions during the same period YOY. Sales on Black Friday day surged by 80%, and when considering the entire month, there was a 39% YOY increase. Transactions went up by 27%, and the use of coupons exploded with a 283% increase compared to the previous year.

The data analysis and application was crucial to enhanced Mercado Libre's market performance during the most challenging season.