Most billboards do the same thing at 9 am and 9 pm. Corona’s billboard in Brighton worked for exactly 15 minutes a day. Miss that window, and all you see is a yellow board with a bottle label. Catch it at golden hour, and the sun does the rest.
The Build
In May 2022, Corona installed a six metre tall yellow billboard on Brighton’s seafront promenade as part of its global “Made from the Natural World” campaign, developed by Wieden+Kennedy Portland and brought to life by Sketch Events. The structure had two components: a flat yellow board in the centre displaying the Corona bottle label. And on the side, a section of foliage native to Brighton, cut and shaped into a precise stencil through which sunlight could pass.
The foliage cutout was not decorative. It was the mechanism. When the sun dropped to the right position in the sky each evening, specifically between 6:30 pm and 6:45 pm, light passed through the foliage stencil and cast shadows across the yellow face of the board. Those shadows formed the silhouette of the iconic Corona bottle, complete with the tagline “Made from the Natural World” appearing in shadow on the billboard’s surface. Outside that 15-minute window, no bottle. No message. Just a yellow board.
The Engineering Behind It
Getting a shadow to land in a specific place, in a specific shape, at a specific time, is not a creative instinct. It is mathematics. The Wieden+Kennedy team spent months measuring sun angles, tracking the movement of light across the Brighton seafront at different times of day and across different seasons, calculating the precise position and orientation the board needed to occupy, and testing the foliage stencil geometry against those calculations before a single piece of material was cut.
Creative directors Dan Viens and Josh Bogdan described the core idea as a desire to make nature show up physically in the advertising, not as an image of nature or a reference to nature, but as a functional participant in producing the work. The brief was built around Corona’s claim that its beer is brewed from 100% natural ingredients. The logical extension was to make the advertising itself dependent on a natural element to function.
That dependency was also a risk. The sun is not a reliable production partner. On day three of the installation, Brighton woke to heavy cloud cover. The team had no backup. The billboard did not work that day. When the clouds broke, and the shadows appeared as planned, the creative directors described it as the most dramatic moment of the entire production.
The Location Decision
Brighton was chosen with deliberate precision. The city had recently been ranked the most eco-conscious and sustainability aware city in the United Kingdom, making it the most aligned audience in the country for a campaign built around natural ingredients and environmental messaging. The seafront promenade location placed the billboard in the path of evening foot traffic at exactly the time of day when the billboard was designed to activate, ensuring the 15-minute window was witnessed by the highest possible number of people.
The installation was accompanied by a live acoustic sunset gig on the seafront, powered entirely by a solar charged generator. The bar serving drinks was constructed from repurposed wooden pallets. Every physical element of the activation was built to carry the same “natural world” logic as the billboard itself, making the event a consistent demonstration of the campaign’s claim rather than a conventional brand experience layered over it.
What It Communicated
Irini Komodikis, marketing director for Europe at Corona, described the strategic intent plainly: the brand has relinquished control, allowing the power of the sun to take over and illuminate the beauty and benefits of using 100% natural ingredients. The phrase “relinquished control” is the precise one. A brand that hands its primary advertising tool to the sun is making a different kind of claim to naturalness than one that simply prints the word natural on a label.
The One Show entry for the campaign framed it this way: 1,000 hours went into creating a billboard that was 100% natural. The engineering required to make nature do the work is what makes the work credible. Anyone can say “natural.” Very few can build something that only functions when the sun cooperates.
The campaign won a One Show Pencil and received the Ad of the Day designation from The Drum on launch day. The behind the scenes story of its production, particularly the cloud cover crisis on day three, became a secondary piece of content that extended the campaign’s media life beyond the initial announcement.
Campaign Name: “Made from the Natural World”
Agency Name: Wieden+Kennedy Portland / Design and Installation: Sketch Events
Brand Name: Corona Europe (AB InBev)
Location: Brighton Seafront Promenade, Brighton, United Kingdom
