The archive · Advertising · Marketing decision · 2021
Mercado Livre restages cinema's most famous straight kisses with real LGBTQ+ couples
For Pride Month, Mercado Livre recreated pop culture's most famous straight kisses with real LGBTQ+ couples, so queer love enters the canon itself.
Mercado Livre
What it had to solve
Kisses saturate pop culture, yet nearly all of its most famous ones are cis-hetero — and if life imitates art, it is little wonder LGBTQ+ people are shunned and attacked in many countries. Mercado Libre, Latin America's biggest ecommerce company and the official sponsor of São Paulo Pride Parade, wanted to use its continental reach to help normalize every kind of love.
How it works
Kisses are part of pop culture, but most of history's most famous kisses are cis-hetero. Mercado Libre, Latin America's biggest ecommerce company and the official sponsor of São Paulo Pride Parade, reasoned that if life imitates art it is no surprise that LGBTQ+ people are shunned, and even attacked, in many countries.
For Pride Month in June 2021 the brand launched New Iconic Kisses (Novos Beijos Icônicos), recreating iconic straight kisses from cinema, history and pop culture with real-life LGBTQ+ couples. Created with GUT São Paulo, the campaign began the day of the online São Paulo Pride Parade and invited LGBTQ+ influencers and illustrators to take part.
Instead of inventing new images of queer love, it rewrote ones the world already knows: the same recognizable poses, now performed by real same-sex couples, so the pop-culture canon itself starts to look different.
Why it lands
- Restaging recognizable kisses gives viewers an instant before-and-after — the only change is the couple — so the message needs no explanation.
- Using real LGBTQ+ couples rather than actors performing a role ties the imagery to lived experience and to Pride itself.
- Inviting LGBTQ+ influencers and illustrators from the community carries the images through channels the community already trusts.
- An ecommerce sponsor turned its Pride sponsorship into a visible rewrite of culture's romantic canon instead of a logo on a float.
What it did
Same-sex couples now stand inside the very images pop culture already treats as iconic, making the re-framing instant and legible: the only thing that changed is who is kissing. The campaign is filed in the D&AD awards archive under Film.
What you can take
To normalize a group, edit the existing canon rather than only creating new imagery: a same-sex restaging of a kiss everyone recognizes triggers an instant comparison of who gets to be iconic.
Since then
The campaign ran through Pride Month 2021 and the images kept circulating: that October they were shown as a digital exhibition on Google's diversity-and-inclusion platform for São Paulo's Museum of Sexual Diversity. The work was named Best Influencer Marketing Campaign at the PRWeek Global Awards 2022 and is filed in the D&AD awards archive under Film.
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