Viral Marketing

Moon Over Corona Beer

Winner of a 2014 Cannes Outdoor Advertising Award, this Corona Extra billboard campaign feels like a high school science project on steroids – e.g., drop a raw egg from 30 feet without breaking it, make a rocket that can shoot across a football field, build your own fog tornado. In this case, Corona and its ad agency Cramer-Krasselt in Chicago came up with a way to put a real crescent moon on top of a Corona bottle billboard.

It was all very clever and fun in a geeky way. The idea involved showing an open bottle of Corona Extra surrounded by the moon in its different phases. The beer bottle itself butted up to the top edge of the billboard. By calculating the angle of the moon at a specific geographic location, the time that it would be in its crescent phase, and other measurements, the creative team could precisely predict when the moon would rest on the bottle top like a wedge of lime. Such calculations, however, are typically beyond the ken of “right brain” advertising people, so they turned to experts at top universities and planetariums for help. The consensus was that on June 14 and June 15, 2013, the crescent moon would be positioned over the bottle top shown on the billboard at 15th Street and 9th Avenue in Manhattan. The historic lunar lime event was publicized online and via social media and created such a buzz that spectators came out specifically to witness the moon hovering over the Corona bottle. Such an occurrence is even rarer than a lunar eclipse.