Mercado Libre is the #1 Latin American marketplace in terms of users and items delivered daily. It is literally democratizing commerce and finance for millions of people with a highly intuitive app experience and a very simple and visual communication. That explains the success of the brand in a region where according to the latest UNESCO census, 2 out of every 10 Latin Americans cannot read properly and 32 million are illiterate.

Now place yourself in march 2020. When the pandemic was starting to spread across Latam in a sea of misinformation and a region that was far from ready to confront it

Brief: As a regional leading Brands, we had to do what was in our reach to help raise awareness about the basic ways in which the general population can stop the spreading of covid-19.

Objectives: - Use Mercado Libre’s massive reach to work for a common purpose.

Mercado Libre is #1 marketplace in Latin America, with over 400M of active users.

And for more than 20 years, its iconic logo has been a “handshake closing a deal”.

So in march 2020 when the pandemic reached Latam, the iconic logo was redesigned, and changed for one that would help people understand the importance of Social Distancing: An elbow bump.

Mercado Libre is the biggest marketplace in Latin America, with over 400M of active users.

And for more than 20 years, its iconic logo has been a handshake.

So we changed it for a new one more appropriate for these times: An elbow bump.

We wanted to show everyone that if such a big brand can change from one day to the next, how could people not change their habits as well?

A message that literally talked to everyone. Individuals, organizations and press. Even that part of the population with illiteracy or reading problems.

The logo was replaced across the full ecosystem. In the home screen of 400M phones, on the trucks, the uniforms, and the 250M boxes delivered every day.

No assets were distributed. Everyone just watched it happening in real life. Mercado Libre’s founder @marcos_galperin tweeted about it spontaneously and the news spreaded beyond Latam.

The logo swap was planned and deployed in 48 hours. It was implemented first in the app of 400M phones, in the comms, the trucks, the uniforms, and as days passed on 250M boxes delivered every day.

The redesign respects every aspect of the brand that people recognize. The idea was to communicate that if such a big brand can change from one day to the next, how could people not change their habits as well?

A huge rebranding, in real time, triggered by reality, and with the purpose of helping change an old rooted habit like the handshake.

“Elbow to Elbow” in spanish means “to work together united” and that became the company’s mantra showing a logo that would adapt in certain communications to show the brand working elbow to elbow with the red cross, food banks or entrepreneurs that were hardly hit by the economic crisis.

- Positive sentiment towards the brand increased by +10 points

- 44% increase in app downloads (5M new users)

- #1 brand that best reacted to the pandemic in Kantar research

- Brand leadership is sustained with 93% spontaneous recall and 72% Top Of Mind, followed by Amazon with only 46% and 8% respectively.

More than 3M dollars raised in donations for the red cross and foodbanks.

The logo swap was addressed by Media across the region from Folha SP and Globo to the New Yorker.