Corona
The platform Corona's beach world runs on.
Corona turned 100. Wink and Wieden+Kennedy made the anniversary campaign. We came in for the design and technology of the digital hub on corona.com: a hundred of the world's best beaches on one animated, living map. Not a campaign with an end date, but a lasting effort to celebrate the coast and protect it.
The idea
Nature over tech: a hub that sends people outside.
The idea was a direction, not a feature: nature over tech. Corona isn't really about beer. It's about the outdoors: the beach, the sun, being off the clock. For the 100-year campaign, working closely with Wink, we built a hub that spoke that language. No loud brand platform, just an answer to one plain question: where should you go, in nature?
What we made
An animated map, and a hundred beaches picked by people who live them.
So we put nature on the screen as honestly as we could, to send people off it. An animated map set the stage: the sun in its real position, the water reflecting it back, waves rolling, wildlife on their actual migration paths. Every beach carried its own live data: local time, tide, weather, UV, and the golden Corona moment at sunset.
A hundred beaches, from South Africa to Norway, Mexico to the UK, each picked by a global panel of surfers, oceanographers and ocean advocates. People who actually live the beach life. They sorted every one into three tiers: one sun to unwind, two for the highlight of a trip, three worth a whole holiday. Every page went deep: travel diaries, the best spot to sit, the best time to come.
What we did
Live on time, inside a CMS that couldn't move.
The map and the beaches were the visible work. The harder part sat underneath. corona.com runs on an aging CMS that was never built for any of this, and the launch date could not move. So we kept the editors working while the back end was still going up: they filled the beaches into shared spreadsheets, ready to drop in the moment it stood. It was live on time, so Lady Gaga could tell two million people on the beach at Copacabana that the platform was up. The campaign moved on. The platform stayed: every year the Corona Beach 100 relaunches here, all hundred beaches on corona.com, tuned where it needs it.