Beat Machine
Bacardi
Issue 53 | December 2019
Agency
BBDO New York
Creative Team
Chief Creative Officer, BBDO Worldwide: David Lubars Chief Creative Officer, BBDO New York: Greg Hahn Executive Creative Directors: Marcos Kotlhar, Danilo Boer Associate Creative Directors: Gabrielle Attia, Bruno Borges Senior Art Director: Sho Matsuzaki
Production Team
Head of Integrated Production: David Rolfe Executive Producer: Sofia Handler Producer: Molly Ross Music Producer: Julia Millison Production Company: Stink
Other Credits
Senior Project Manager: Noreen Masih Senior Account Director: Steven Panariello Account Director: Josh Goodman Account Manager: Meghan Wood Account Executive: Aimee Chimera Social Manager: Clare McGough Group Planning Directors: Jessica Strode, Steve Panawek Communications Planning Director: Jen Leung Communications Planner: Ali Goldsmith
Date
August 2019
Background
Bacardí believes music is one of the most important forms of self-expression. After launching a track in partnership with Major Lazer and Anitta, the brand allowed their fans to make the song their own.
Idea
In 2019, Bacardí turned a Youtube video into a sound editing software, by launching the Beat Machine. 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 utilise that characteristic so that at every 10% of the video, a new beat from the Major Lazer and Anitta’s brandlaunched track would kick in, allowing people to have fun remixing it by simply using their numeric keyboard.
Results
The campaign generated +37 million media impressions within a week and had people playing 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!
Our Thoughts
In November, I was at a conference in Moscow about creativity. One of the other speakers showed this work because it seems young Russians are pretty much like young Americans; they love music, they love hacking tech and they love this idea.
So do I. Despite working at Google for five years, I never knew you could do this on YouTube.
The marketers at Bacardi aren’t just ahead of the pack in understanding popular culture today and how brands can (and, equally, cannot) be a part of it, they have the nouse to work with an agency that is equally ahead of the game in terms of crafting ideas people want to be part of.