Since we knew people across the country were organizing viewing parties and getting prepared for tis once in a century event, we wanted to be a part of their celebrations. So we wanted to rally people to “Raise a Corona to the corona.” Our idea was that here on Earth the best way to greet the sun’s corona appearing was to raise a Corona of your own to it. It’s was a simple turn of phrase and simple action that let people play along with the biggest celestial event of the century.

We started by prepping people for the eclipse. We created content that got them ready to raise their own Coronas to the corona and seeded our hashtag #CoronaEclipse. This was followed up with a social video that showed people how to make an eclipse viewer out of a Corona 12-pack. Finally, for select influencers and media, we created limited edition Corona Extra eclipse viewing kits, complete with NASA approved eclipse glasses, 2 bottles of Corona and a lime, and a countdown clock that let the recipient know exactly when the eclipse would happen in their city. On the day of the eclipse, we hosted our own viewing party in Nashville, the most optimal viewing city in the country and one of our bigger markets. We gathered UGC from our fans, combined it with our own content captured at the viewing party, and created a video celebrating the whole coast-to-coast toast.

On a shoestring budget, our results were, dare we say, astronomical. On our own channels, we garnered an engagement rate double the size of our normal rate. We received 74,000 post reactions and outperformed all social media benchmarks for the brand, dwarfing our best every share numbers for a social program. Our work reached over 20 million people, with nearly 25 million total impressions. Corona was featured in several live news broadcasts of the eclipse and across a variety of media outlets. And in Nashville, the key market where we hosted our viewing party, we saw a 60x lift in Corona sales.