The campaign utilized the release of a music video starring a Grammy-winning transgender artist to raise awareness about a real issue faced by the community. The entire concept stemmed from musical entertainment, allowing consumers to visit a closed museum, explore its artworks, and directly access its online gift shop.

Despite the outward vision of a free and progressive country, Brazil holds many conservative values. A terrible example of this: Brazil is the country that kills the most LGBTQIA+ people in the world. This disease grew even bigger in the recent years led by the election of the ultra-right and homophobic president Jair Bolsonaro. And even though he leaves office at the end of 2022, he has left a terrible legacy with many elected politicians acting and perpetuating their disgusting ideology that threatens the community. One of the main ways of doing this is by censoring initiatives that support the cause like music festivals, theater shows, books, movies and, at the time, the Museum of Sexual Diversity. A space where artists from the community exhibit their work and tell their story. As the official sponsor of the LGBT parade and pride month in recent years, Mercado Libre felt that only it could do something concrete to help.

Brazil has been experiencing various episodes of censorship driven by the far right against any progressive initiative. In one of the most recent cases, the Museum of Sexual Diversity, one of the country's most visited, faced a significant setback: far-right Brazilian deputy Gil Diniz passed a bill to cut 30 million in public funding, making it impossible to keep the museum open. A huge loss for the recognition of a community that fights for its rights every day. As a brand that has been a long-time partner of the LGBT community and provides millions of online solutions to consumers every day, Mercado Libre felt the need to create a campaign to help raise enough funds online to reopen the museum.

Two discoveries leads our strategy thinking:

1. The community acts like a family supporting each other to keep LGBT culture alive.

2. Music is the main form of identification for them.

So, first, we showcased how important the issue was. Then, we explained what needed to be done by them to be part of the solution. Finally, we created a meaningful awareness asset with an LGBT artist who impacts a significant portion of the community to have enough engaged targets jumping into the cause.

As half of the revenue of museums comes from gift shop's souvenirs, we did what only the largest e-commerce in Latin America could do: an online store. But this time, featuring souvenirs from iconic museum's artworks. To attract new visitors to it, we partnered with the Grammy-winning transgender artist Liniker for the release of a new song whose performance was a virtual tour inside the closed museum. Each work featured on it was clickable, leading directly to the online gift shop on Mercado Libre's platform, where people could purchase products with the same art and help to keep the museum alive. To amplify the reach we also spread OOH and social media ads featuring QR codes that directly led to the gift shop too.

Besides opening the museum's gift shop on Mercado Libre, we needed to find a way for people to visit it. However, with the museum closed, that would be impossible. Therefore, we produced a music video whose story takes place inside the closed museum. Mixing dream and reality, the artist wandered through the artworks. At any moment, the audience could interact with the video by hovering their mouse over the artworks, instantly discovering products featuring that art. With a simple click, the audience was taken directly to the online gift shop hosted on the Mercado Libre platform to make a purchase.

The performance was hosted on a project hub, which explained the project and introduced the artists. To support the campaign's promotion, we also placed OOH advertisements in strategic locations in major cities for the LGBT community and boosted digital media to reach this audience on social media as well.

The campaign got 550 million impressions.

+700K people watched the performance.

The gift shop got 5 million visitors during the campaign.

All the souvenirs were sold in under 30 minutes.

And after months of closed doors, the museum finally gathered enough funds to reopen on May 24th.

For the first time, a museum store was opened on the platform of the largest e-commerce in Latin America. The store will remain open, managed by the museum itself, which can now distribute its products nationally.