Tradicional is the Cuervo family's original handcrafted tequila dating back over 219 years. "History in a Bottle" was created to showcase this enduring craftsmanship and position Cuervo as a truly authentic tequila.

But we didn’t want to just tell people about Cuervo’s past, we wanted them to experience a truly handmade history. And we needed to give people a reason to choose Jose Cuervo during the tequila industry’s most crucial selling period.

The average consumer has no idea that Cuervo is the oldest distillery in Latin America, or that the brand has a rich heritage of producing 100% agave premium tequila.

The strategy was to educate consumers about Cuervo’s dedication to craft and authenticity by letting them experience it first hand. We even launched on Cinco de Mayo—an Americanized Mexican holiday usually reserved for partying. However, Cuervo is one of the few tequilas that was around during the original Cinco. It was the perfect day for an authenticity message to break through.

The campaign launched with a YouTube homepage takeover that racked up 44 million impressions with a click thru rate exceeding the YouTube benchmark by 1.1x. In less than 2 weeks post-launch, the spot received over 700K. Social posts promoted the campaign and further built awareness of Tradicional's authenticity, leading to over 4x the average engagement on our social channels. In end, after six straight years of declines, Jose Cuervo enjoyed its first year of growth in 2014 with a 0.9% bump to 3.4 million cases.

Tradicional is entirely handcrafted. So we re-created famous scenes from Cuervo’s past inside bottles of Tradicional using handcrafted figurines to represent historical characters. 65 puppets were molded and clothed in custom costumes (including nail polish). 5 scenes from Cuervo’s past were then placed inside 4-feet tall resin replicas of Tradicional bottles.

The characters launched in TV/online films. Paid social turned them into social media stars. Cuervo.com was even transformed into five full websites representing different eras of Cuervo tequila.

The film and social drove traffic to a landing page experience where fans downloaded our augmented reality app. Fans used the app to scan bottles of Tradicional and reveal 3D scenes from Cuervo’s history inside the bottle. From Casa Cuervo in 1795 to the invention of the Margarita in 1945, we helped people take home their own piece of Cuervo history.