Mitsubishi Enlists Fernando Meirelles and Sebastião Salgado for Pajero Sport
Mitsubishi's 'The Legend of Legends' is a 2019 Brazilian content campaign created by Ampfy for the Pajero Sport, uniting filmmaker Fernando Meirelles, photographer Sebastião Salgado, and conductor João Carlos Martins to extend the vehicle's established 'The Car. The Legend.' brand platform through collaborative cultural storytelling.
Published in Brazil in May 2019, the campaign — known locally as 'A Lenda das Lendas' — comprises five media assets and unfolds across two distinct phases. The first documents the meeting and creative process of its three celebrated collaborators. The second presents the finished work they produced together, including a photographic body of work and a musical score composed by João Carlos Martins with A9 Áudio, as reported by Propmark Com Br. Waldick Jatobá served as curator and moderated a public talk connected to the campaign launch, according to propmark.com.br.
The campaign's strategic premise is precise: rather than staging the Pajero Sport as a product to be sold, Mitsubishi and Ampfy position it as a cultural object worthy of serious artistic attention. Meirelles, Salgado, and Martins are engaged not as brand endorsers but as genuine creative collaborators, each contributing their own distinct discipline — cinema, photography, and music respectively — to a single shared project. This framing elevates the vehicle into a conversation about Brazilian creative legacy. The automotive industry in Brazil had by 2019 become intensely competitive, with global manufacturers including Toyota and Volkswagen maintaining significant presence in the market, and the premium SUV segment demanding brand narratives that reach beyond specification sheets. Mitsubishi's response, executed through Ampfy, is to anchor the Pajero Sport within the cultural imagination of its home market, lending the vehicle a prestige that conventional automotive advertising rarely achieves. The Clapboard Score for this campaign is 61 out of 100.
Mitsubishi positioned the Pajero Sport as a symbol of enduring cultural relevance rather than technical superiority. This strategic choice reflects a clear reading of the Brazilian consumer landscape, where premium automotive purchases are frequently motivated by identity and aspiration as much as performance data.
The campaign extends Mitsubishi's existing 'The Car. The Legend.' brand platform, as documented by adsoftheworld.com, deepening its narrative investment rather than departing from established territory. By recruiting figures whose own cultural standing is beyond dispute — Meirelles directed 'City of God', Salgado is among the world's most exhibited documentary photographers, and Martins is a nationally celebrated conductor — Ampfy transfers the authority those names carry onto the Pajero Sport itself. The logic is associative but rigorous: legends, the campaign argues, recognise one another.
In Brazil, the automotive sector was operating under significant pressure in 2019. Global passenger-car sales reached approximately 75 million units that year, down roughly five percent year over year, according to motoringresearch.com. Mitsubishi Motors recorded first-half 2019 global sales of approximately 647,000 units, up around five percent year over year, according to autoindustriya.com, but the broader market contraction placed sustained emphasis on brand differentiation. Competitors such as Toyota — the global sales leader with approximately 8.86 million vehicles sold in 2018, according to cnbc.com — and the Volkswagen Group maintained formidable dealer and marketing infrastructure across the Brazilian market. Against that competitive pressure, Mitsubishi and Ampfy elected to pursue depth over volume, producing a campaign whose cultural density would be difficult for volume-oriented rivals to replicate. The five-asset content structure reflects a deliberate commitment to sustained engagement rather than a single broadcast moment.
Fernando Meirelles directs the filmed component of 'The Legend of Legends', bringing documentary precision and narrative authority to the campaign's visual language. His involvement is not decorative — it shapes the structural logic of the entire project.
The campaign is built around the idea of witnessing a creative encounter. Meirelles documents the process by which three artists of significant international standing come together, respond to a shared subject, and produce something new. Sebastião Salgado contributes the photographic aesthetic, applying to the Pajero Sport the same monumental black-and-white sensibility that defines his landmark humanitarian and environmental bodies of work. The resulting images carry weight that conventional automotive photography cannot manufacture. João Carlos Martins and A9 Áudio compose the musical score, giving the campaign a sonic architecture that coheres with its visual ambition, as reported by propmark.com.br.
Waldick Jatobá, serving as curator, provides an additional layer of institutional credibility. His role moderating the public talk connected to the campaign launch — documented by propmark.com.br — signals that Ampfy and Mitsubishi structured this project as a genuine cultural event, not merely an advertising exercise with cultural camouflage. The two-phase production structure reinforces this: the first phase captures the making, the second presents the outcome. This sequencing gives audiences entry points at different moments, sustaining attention across the campaign's five media assets rather than exhausting interest in a single release. The craft decisions throughout — from Meirelles' lens to Salgado's tonal palette to the scored music — are internally consistent, producing a campaign that holds together as a unified aesthetic object rather than a collection of executions. According to adsoftheworld.com, the campaign's five assets reflect this coherent multi-disciplinary construction.
No verified performance data for 'The Legend of Legends' is publicly available in terms of sales lift, unit-sales results, or published reach and engagement metrics.
What is documented is the campaign's awards record at the 2019 Wave Festival, the leading regional advertising prize for Latin America. The campaign won Silver in the Film category and Silver in the Branded Content category for the Pajero Sport, and received Shortlist recognition in both the Social and Influencer category and the Film Craft category, according to Wave Festival records cited by latinspots.com. No verified recognition was recorded at Cannes Lions, the Effie Awards, The One Show, D&AD, the Clio Awards, the Webby Awards, or WARC.
The Wave Festival silvers are meaningful signals. Branded Content is among the most contested categories in Latin American advertising, and recognition there confirms that industry peers judged the campaign structurally sound as both entertainment and marketing. The Film Craft shortlist further validates Meirelles' directorial contribution as meeting a professional standard beyond the automotive category norms.
Structurally, the campaign's effectiveness rests on its transfer of cultural authority. By placing three figures of genuine national and international stature at its centre, Mitsubishi and Ampfy create a campaign that earns attention rather than purchasing it. The five-asset architecture allows the Branded Content and Film executions to operate on different platforms with different audience tolerances for duration and depth. Whether that structural ambition translated into measurable commercial outcome for the Pajero Sport in Brazil's 2019 automotive market remains undocumented in the public record.
'The Legend of Legends' is a 2019 Brazilian content campaign by Ampfy for Mitsubishi's Pajero Sport. Known locally as 'A Lenda das Lendas', it united filmmaker Fernando Meirelles, photographer Sebastião Salgado, and conductor João Carlos Martins as creative collaborators across five media assets, extending the vehicle's 'The Car. The Legend.' brand platform.
Ampfy created the 'The Legend of Legends' campaign for Mitsubishi in Brazil. The São Paulo-based agency developed the project in two phases: first documenting the creative meeting of its three collaborators, then presenting the resulting photographic and musical work connected to the Pajero Sport, as reported by propmark.com.br.
Fernando Meirelles directed the filmed component of the campaign. Sebastião Salgado contributed the photographic aesthetic and João Carlos Martins composed the musical score with A9 Áudio. Waldick Jatobá served as curator and moderated the public talk at the campaign launch, according to propmark.com.br.
The campaign won two Silver awards at the 2019 Wave Festival: one in the Film category and one in the Branded Content category, both for Pajero Sport. It also received Shortlist recognition in the Social and Influencer and Film Craft categories, according to Wave Festival records cited by latinspots.com.
The Clapboard Score for 'The Legend of Legends' is 61 out of 100. The score reflects the campaign's cultural ambition and Wave Festival recognition, balanced against the absence of publicly verified performance data for the Pajero Sport in Brazil's 2019 automotive market.
Mitsubishi and Ampfy pursued depth-led cultural storytelling while competitors such as Toyota and Volkswagen maintained volume-oriented marketing in Brazil. Global passenger-car sales fell around five percent in 2019, according to motoringresearch.com, intensifying brand differentiation pressure across the automotive segment and making the campaign's prestige positioning a deliberate strategic counter-move.
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