BACARDÍ Festivals 2022

The U.S. summer music festival season is dynamic – it spreads nationwide, is highly segmented but is cluttered with sponsors. BACARDÍ wanted to enhance the on-site experience through unique activations at key festivals as existing sponsors by broadcasting their experiences and energy to millions of viewers online, positioning themselves as the unofficial host to kick off the festival season.

First Tube identified Governors Ball and Life Is Beautiful as the two tentpole music festival sponsorships and key brand moments to elevate and amplify BACARDÍ’s summer 2022 music festival presence. First Tube employed a hybrid event approach that reached audiences IRL as well as online, ensuring that the online content was worthy of extended tune-in time. They achieved this through artist selection, unique programming and a highly analytical approach to media buying for pre-promotion, live tune-in and post-show VOD.

For Governors Ball, BACARDÍ successfully created a new tropical-tinged pre-show for fans to truly ‘open the gates’. The eve before the festival gates opened, two of the most buzzed-about DJ duos, disco/house mavericks The Martinez Brothers and amapiano visionaries Major League DJz., were announced moments before they took the stage. Online pre-promotion generated significant tune-in for the mystery guests and a media partnership with Rolling Stone broke the story.

At Life is Beautiful, BACARDÍ brought a 500-person activation known globally as Casa BACARDÍ to festival goers all weekend long. During the most popular time at the festival, they offered their guests an up close and intimate performance with Latin music superstar Farruko. The performance generated awareness to fans onsite and streamed live across BACARDÍ and Farruko’s socials, extending the experience to Farruko and music festival fans at home.

The BACARDÍ Summer Music Festival campaign generated 44.8 million impressions (132% of goal) and 31.5 million views (270% of goal) of livestream content with a reach of 14.7 million (121% of goal). The program exceeded all campaign KPIs, as well as the previous year’s festival campaign delivery with Jhay Cortez. The livestreamed performance generated an average watch time of nearly 15 minutes on BACARDÍ YouTube channel.