How Corona Found Success With YouTube Shorts

Corona, a Mexican lager owned globally by Anheuser-Busch InBev (AB InBev), drifted from its traditional long-form video strategy to focus on short-form content for a recent regional effort. The YouTube campaign was designed to draw attention to the Cape Town, South Africa leg of the brand’s Sunsets Festival World Tour, ultimately putting up a video completion rate of 21.2% and getting 1.3 million views, according to a case study released by Google. The effort also delivered 5.1 million impressions in a month for the brand, which is managed by Constellation Brands in the U.S.

The campaign was developed with iProspect South Africa, a Dentsu partner agency, to drive awareness of the festival and the Corona brand as well as promote ticket sales. Testing revealed short-form content could help drive interest. YouTube Shorts was chosen because it allowed both alcohol marketing and swipeable content. 

YouTube Shorts is Google’s answer to TikTok, which has exploded in popularity, especially among younger users. While TikTok continues to dominate engagement rates, YouTube Shorts has slowly gained influence over the past two years.

The Corona campaign also included bumper ads and TrueView advertisements, with Dentsu Performance tasked with implementing the right ad types at the appropriate points in the consumer journey. Six-second bumper ads were used to drive awareness, TrueView ads gave consumers a better look at the festival and Shorts were used to drive ticket sales. 

The creative focused on correlating Corona with the sunset and utilized soft colors and other visual elements. Relaxing music was meant to create a sense of community and togetherness. Additionally, the material featured some of the most popular artists in South Africa including Majozi, Good Luck, Msaki and Sun-El Musician.

YouTube recently made it easier to gauge the effectiveness of ads in driving website visits. In early September, the video platform added a website visit goal in YouTube Studio. The goal is available across Shorts, the main feed and in-stream advertisements. Prior to that, YouTube made it possible for advertisers to place their campaigns alongside top-performing Shorts. Short-form content on the platform is viewed by 2 billion users every month.