Most beer brands own an occasion. Corona owns a feeling, and the sun is its primary creative tool. For over a decade, the brand has been building a body of work that treats sunlight not as a scenic backdrop but as a functional advertising medium, a product ingredient, and occasionally, a co-author of the visual itself. No other beer brand comes close to the consistency or ambition of what Corona has built around a single natural phenomenon.
The Ritual That Started It All
The lime wedge pushed into a Corona bottle is one of the most replicated rituals in beer culture. Nobody mandated it. It spread organically and became inseparable from the product’s identity. Corona’s marketing teams recognised early that the ritual, performed at golden hour, on beaches, at sunset, in outdoor settings everywhere, was the brand’s true product. Not the beer. The moment. The sun is what the moment is made of. Everything that follows builds from that observation.
The Natural Billboard: Brighton, 2022
Wieden+Kennedy London and Sketch Events installed a six-metre yellow billboard on Brighton’s seafront with a foliage stencil on its side, precisely engineered to let sunlight pass through and cast the shadow of a Corona bottle onto the board’s face. It worked for exactly 15 minutes each evening, between 6:30 and 6:45pm, when the sun’s angle aligned correctly. A thousand hours of engineering went into producing a 15-minute daily advertisement. On day three, it rained and the billboard did not work. No backup plan existed. The tagline read “Made from the Natural World,” and Brighton, ranked the UK’s most eco-conscious city, was not chosen by accident.
The Eclipse: South America, 2024
On October 2, 2024, a rare annular solar eclipse passed over South America. The eclipsed sun, partially obscured and ringed with light, resembles a lime slice placed over a bottle neck. DAVID Miami dispatched photographers to pre-researched positions in Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina to capture the alignment. The resulting image was indistinguishable from a product shot. No compositing. No digital manipulation. The tagline read “For Every Slice of Sun.” A celestial event that occurs once every several years became a Corona advertisement that required nothing except preparation and a camera pointed at the sky at exactly the right moment.
Sunbrew 0.0%: Global, 2022
DAVID Miami did not just make the campaign for this product. They conceived the product and pitched it to Corona. The result was Corona Sunbrew 0.0%, the world’s first non-alcoholic beer infused with Vitamin D, carrying 30% of the recommended daily value per 330ml serving. Launched in Canada in January 2022, when Canadians experience minimum sunlight, the tagline “Sunshine, Anytime” extended the sun platform into a year-round nutritional proposition. The product and the marketing were built from the same insight simultaneously, which is why they read as a single coherent statement rather than a product with an ad bolted on.
The Sunset Experience: Lima, 2025
Corona and Leo Peru took over every digital billboard along Lima’s busiest avenues simultaneously during evening rush hour and replaced all advertising content with a live, uninterrupted broadcast of the sunset, on multiple occasions timed to the last best sunsets of the Peruvian summer. No brand message ran during the broadcast. No logo was visible. The brand revealed itself only after the sun had set. By converting the city’s most congested media environment into a shared natural moment at peak stress, Corona produced something that could not be bought through a standard media plan.
The Other Sunset: Costa Rica, 2025
Corona’s ritual is built around the evening. Madison DDB Costa Rica noticed that the Caribbean coast beaches of Cocles and Cahuita face east and have no sunsets, only sunrises. The campaign “The Other Sunset” reframed Corona Cero, the brand’s zero-alcohol variant, around a sunrise ritual for a product that no longer requires waiting for the day to end. The bottle, the lime, the horizon, the water: all present, just facing the other direction. A new ritual was declared, built from the same sun.
The Consistent Logic
No other beer brand has built a comparable body of work around a single natural element. The campaigns span product development, engineering, photography, live broadcast, and the occasional celestial event. Each one starts from the same observation: the moment a Corona is best enjoyed happens in natural light, and natural light can be recruited as the advertising medium itself. The sun is not a metaphor in Corona’s campaign portfolio. It is the creative director.
