Medalla Light is Puerto Rico's leading beer. Having established a strong lead in the local market (and partly due to the island's shrinking population), the brand has begun looking outside of the island for growth opportunities.

Medalla began exporting last year to Florida, and will enter 5 additional markets across the US, Latin America and the Caribbean later this year. The plan is to continue expanding across the Western Hemisphere for the foreseeable future.

Accordingly, our client has tasked us with thinking of ways to spread awareness of the brand in new and future markets. Since we’re still small outside of Puerto Rico and budgets remain quite limited, the challenge is identifying cost-effective ways to build the brand at minimal cost.

Objectives:

-Partner with young emerging artists with potential to grow among Latino audiences.

-Achieve 5 million earned brand impressions through content.

We began with a simple goal: to make Medalla Light a central part of a song's story.

We partnered with Pedro Capó to work on a new song that would integrate the product into the storytelling of a summer beach song. The brand was integrated seamlessly into the chorus, in part because Medalla rhymes with the Spanish word for beach ("playa").

When it comes to music, Puerto Rico certainly punches above its weight. Indeed, during the past couple of decades the island’s musical influence in establishing trends across Latin America (and the US hispanic market) is arguably contested only by Mexico.

This makes it an attractive point of entry for a brand with a rich musical history, such as Medalla. More importantly, it’s a smart long-term investment at this early stage in Medalla’s export strategy: advertisements come and go, but songs such as Calma will remain just as relevant to Capo’s foreign fans years from now.

Strategy: Music will be Medalla’s trojan horse to enter new markets and grow the brand around the world.

Once we partnered with Pedro Capó on the development of the original song, we financed the production of the music video, with careful product placement that made our brand a central part of the video's story without being too obvious. To launch the song, we held a party in San Juan with important influencers and musicians, who helped us spread the word across key markets outside of Puerto Rico.

After the initial success of the song, we identified an opportunity to produce a remix of the song with world-famous reggaetón star Farruko. We immediately signed on to produce the video once again and encouraged Farruko to include the brand naturally in his verses. To launch the remix, we held a party in Miami, Puerto Rico's biggest foreign market, and invited even more international influencers and celebrities, who helped the song become an instant international hit.

Calma became one of the year's biggest pop hits - even spawning an additional remix with Alicia Keys - and Medalla became an internationally known beer with zero advertising budget and minimal production costs:

- Over 1.3 billion earned brand impressions in 85 countries.

- Over 908 million earned views on YouTube (and counting)

- #1 on the Spotify Viral Charts

- #1 most popular song on YouTube for 4 weeks.