No one brand “owned” Dia de Los Muertos and it occupied a much less crowded, and indeed more authentic space than its “cousin” Cinco de Mayo. Pairing el Jimador with the rich cultural traditions of Dia de Los Muertos would create the fresh, relevant connection el Jimador had been looking for.

We would link U.S. Millennials’ deeply-felt emotion in the wake of so many iconic musicians’ deaths in 2016 (The Year the Music Died) to the holiday. Music videos of current artists covering artists who had passed would be paired with pop-culture articles to distinguish Day of the Dead from Mexican ‘Halloween.’

Inspired by the opening scenes of the James Bond movie “Spectre”, Mexico City held its first-ever holiday parade in 2016 complete with floats, skeleton marionettes, and thousands of costumed dancers and acrobats.

We would seize this opportunity to link el Jimador to this holiday.

Partnering with A.V. Club seemed a natural fit to gain exposure for el Jimador while introducing Day of the Dead to a larger American audience.

At the heart of the campaign, four branded “Undercover” videos honored up-and-coming and established musicians –including Phoenix-based folk/punk band AJJ interpreting David Bowie’s “Quicksand,” and Robbie Fulks covering Freddy Powers’ “Little Hotel Room”.

Working closely with A.V. Club, we created a custom editorial section featuring four educational articles about Dia de Los Muertos. One article, entitled “No, it’s not Mexican Halloween: A Beginner’s Guide to Day of the Dead” was sponsored by el Jimador and appeared in the A.V. Club’s feature section.

Custom content included branded start and end cards and featured el Jimador’s stop-motion Day of the Dead pre-roll video as a lead-in. Content was distributed across A.V. Club, The Onion, Flama, and Univision (to reach Hispanic Millennials), and on Facebook Twitter, and YouTube.

Not only did our approach exceed our goals, but our music videos were picked up by Yahoo and several music-authority indie websites including punknews.org & reddit.com, among others… websites reflecting the hippest, edgiest trends.

Our key metrics included views, completions, and engagement:

- The campaign tallied a staggering 51,400,000 impressions

- 3,000,000+ page views on the custom Day of the Dead section, including 2,400,000 unique visitors

With video views up to four minutes, these totaled 23MM, 19MM views on site, and an additional 4,000,000 views across Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube – surpassing by 2.4 times the guaranteed views of 9,500,000.

We achieved a 0.13% media CTR vs. 0.08% site benchmark. We surpassed A.V. Club’s video completion rate benchmark for long-form video: 8.37% which is 67% higher than their benchmark of 5.0%.

Finally, we achieved 20.61% video view rate on Facebook & Instagram, surpassing internal benchmarks of 15% and 16% respectively.