BACARDí had faced several challenges for several years. Sales were declining (-2% portfolio sales), and sales of rum overall were declining (-1% category sales) due to competition and shifts in alcohol consumption trends towards vodka, tequila, and whiskey. BACARDí lost its magic and mojo out in the world. Rather than being perceived as a cool brand in culture, it was perceived as “that” drink only for college frat parties.

As a result, BACARDí launched a new brand platform with a purpose to drive an effective connection among their consumers rooted in culture called Do What Moves You, an invitation to live life as their truest selves, celebrating self-expression and connection through music, dance and movement. With this foundation in place, the question now was, how do we embed the brand into culture by creating a personal connection with our consumers—creating moments where they feel free to be their truest selves.

We thought of a creative idea with the goal to change our audience’s view that BACARDI isn’t just a college frat party drink but instead a brand that is heavily rooted in culture (through music and dance) allowing for individuals to express themselves however they want. This creative idea is BEAT MACHINE, a fun and engaging hack on YouTube.

The brand used a feature that even some YouTube engineers did not know existed, that allows people to fast forward a video using their numeric keyboards. While watching a video on the platform, when you click 1 on your keyboard, your video fast forwards to 10% of the footage, and 2 makes it go to 20%, 3 to 30%.

The Beat Machine video was edited to utilize that characteristic. Every 10% of the video a new loop would start, allowing people to remix the song by simply using their numeric keyboard.

We based our creative idea on three core strategic truths (cultural, consumer and brand). In culture, we know summer is the time when we feel the most free but it’s also a short-lived and fleeting feeling. For our target, they make the most of their fleeting summer and thrive on moments when they can truly express themselves. They make every moment count. For the brand, BACARDí liberates moments when we are free to be our selves through its Latin Caribbean roots, encouraging people to move and let go.

Our audience is heavily engaged online and on social, and we knew simply running a TV spot wasn’t enough to get their attention. The goal of BEAT MACHINE is to change their view that BACARDI isn’t just a college frat party drink but a brand that is heavily rooted in culture (through music and dance) that allows for them to express themselves.

Our approach to campaign activation and roll-out was to truly Act Like an Artist. In doing so, we didn’t want to simply launch this sole activation and call it a day. Instead, we created various activations and tactics which lived on various channels to drive intrigue and excitement throughout the summer. BEAT MACHINE was the launching campaign of a Summer hit produced in partnership with Major Lazor and Anitta called Make it Hot. With our campaign, we gave people the opportunity to truly engage and interact with it by turning their YouTube video into sound mixing software.

We first had paid media support to drive users to a How-to video educating them about the feature and how to use the functionality, which then drove people to the real music video to put their new-found skills to good use.

The campaign generated +37 million media impressions within a week and made people play with the video for a total of 452,088 seconds. The average view duration was 26 seconds, in other words the entire length of the video!

The How-to BEAT MCHINE video garnered +1.3 million video views.