Corona Mexican lager, owned globally by Anheuser-Busch InBev (AB InBev), moved into short-form content for a recent regional campaign from its long-form video strategy. The objective of the YouTube campaign was to draw attention to the Cape Town, South Africa leg of Sunsets Festival World Tour. Ultimately, it pushed through a video completion rate of 21.2% and reached 1.3 million views, based on a case study from Google. The effort also delivered 5.1 million impressions within 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, with a focus on raising festival and Corona brand awareness and driving ticket sales. During these tests, it was found that short-form content can be of huge help in driving interest. YouTube Shorts were chosen as both would allow alcohol marketing and content swipeable.

YouTube Shorts is Google's answer to the extremely popular TikTok app that has blown up, especially among the younger crowd. While TikTok reigns supreme in terms of the engagement rate, YouTube Shorts took over quietly and steadily over the last couple of years.

Additional features of the Corona campaign were bumper ads and TrueView advertisements, at which Dentsu Performance was to present correct types of ads at relevant touchpoints in the consumer journey. The six-second bumper ads led to more awareness, TrueView ads to more graphic content for consumption by consumers, and Shorts helped gear up ticket sales.

This creative focused on relating Corona to the sunset, using soft colors and other visual effects. Peaceful music was to be used to create this sense of community and oneness together. The content also featured some of the country's biggest artists in South Africa: Majozi, Good Luck, Msaki, and Sun-El Musician.

YouTube recently made it easier to track the performance of ads in terms of whether they steer visitors to a website. In early September, the video platform published a website visit goal in YouTube Studio. The goal is now offered everywhere-from Shorts, through the main feed and in-stream ads-and prior to that, YouTube had permitted advertisers to place their campaigns side by side with the top-performing Shorts. Short-form content on the platform has 2 billion users every month.