Desperados Brings Latin Energy to the World with The Beer with Latin Vibe
Desperados launched The Beer with Latin Vibe on 31 January 2025, a global through-the-line campaign created by LePub Milan that replaces traditional advertising with an original music video as its hero asset, built around Colombian producer OVY ON THE DRUMS and Venezuelan rapper MICRO TDH, and released across more than 30 European markets including The Netherlands.
The campaign represents the first major output under Desperados' refreshed brand positioning. Where previous work leaned on broadly experimental and playful territory — including the 2022 Desperados Collective, which supported emerging artists across five countries — this 2025 campaign plants a specific cultural flag. Latin music, Latin fashion, and the spontaneity associated with Latin culture become the organising principle for everything the brand communicates. The strategic shift is deliberate: Desperados has always blended beer with Latin spirits such as agave, cachaça, and rum, and the new positioning simply makes that cultural lineage explicit and central rather than peripheral.
The campaign targets Gen Z and Gen Y consumers, audiences that, in Desperados' own framing, inhabit a world that has grown overly rational and constrained. The creative response to that insight is not a product message but a cultural invitation. Original track GUAO GUAO, produced by OVY ON THE DRUMS in his role as Artistic Director for the brand and performed alongside MICRO TDH, anchors that invitation in sound. The accompanying music video functions simultaneously as entertainment, brand communication, and cultural artefact. In The Netherlands and across the wider European rollout, the campaign extended beyond the screen through an experiential platform called Avenida Desperados, a series of European street parties designed to translate the energy of the music video into physical space, as reported by The Drum. Distribution spanned Spotify, out-of-home placements, and a Snapchat augmented reality activation. Artist procurement and music supervision across the entire campaign were handled by MassiveMusic. The campaign's Clapboard Score is 78 out of 100.
Desperados identified a specific cultural current and built a campaign strategy around it. Latin music's global popularity has grown by 985% on Spotify over the past decade, according to Desperados' own campaign documentation, and that figure frames the strategic logic precisely: the genre is not a niche interest but a mainstream force shaping how young European consumers experience music, fashion, and social life.
In The Netherlands, as across much of Northern Europe, Gen Z and Gen Y consumers increasingly engage with culture through music platforms and creator ecosystems rather than through conventional broadcast media. This audience reality shaped the campaign's channel architecture. Rather than leading with a television commercial, Desperados and LePub Milan led with a music video — a format that lives natively on the platforms where target consumers already spend time. The decision to work with OVY ON THE DRUMS, a Latin Grammy award-winning Colombian producer with global reach, and Venezuelan rapper MICRO TDH, gave the campaign authentic cultural credentials rather than borrowed aesthetics. As reported by Ad Age, the rollout covered more than 30 European markets, with Spotify, out-of-home, and Snapchat AR forming the primary distribution layer.
Desperados competes in a flavoured and premium beer segment that faces pressure from brands including Heineken's own mainstream portfolio and rival flavoured beer entries from AB InBev. The flavoured and premium beer category continues to expand, supported by craft innovation and shifting consumer preferences toward products with distinct taste profiles and cultural identity, according to IMARC Group. Within that competitive context, Desperados' move to anchor the brand in Latin culture — rather than generic experimentation — creates a more defensible creative territory. The 2025 campaign, developed in collaboration with MassiveMusic for artist procurement, is the most culturally specific expression of the Desperados brand to date.
OVY ON THE DRUMS served as Artistic Director for The Beer with Latin Vibe campaign. The Colombian producer, whose credits include Latin Grammy recognition, worked directly with MICRO TDH to write and record GUAO GUAO, the original track at the centre of the campaign. Speaking on 31 January 2025, as quoted in El Publicista, OVY ON THE DRUMS described the collaboration: "It has been my goal for years to bring Latin music to the widest possible audience, so partnering with Desperados as their artistic director has been a dream. I worked side by side with my friend Micro TDH to create the perfect vibe and catchy lyrics for the track GUAO GUAO."
The music video that serves as the campaign's hero asset transforms an ordinary grocery store into a full dance setting, as reported by The Drum. The choice of location is strategically precise: a supermarket aisle is one of the most mundane, constrained environments imaginable, which makes its transformation into a space of spontaneous Latin energy a direct visual argument for the campaign's core theme. The tension between the ordinary and the exhilarating is resolved not through fantasy but through the presence of Latin music and the people who carry its culture. MICRO TDH's performance and the production's visual language root the video in contemporary Latin creative aesthetics rather than a generalised tropical shorthand.
LePub Milan led creative development, with MassiveMusic handling artist procurement and music supervision throughout. The campaign also incorporated a Snapchat augmented reality experience and an out-of-home presence across European markets including The Netherlands, extending the visual world of the music video into physical and digital environments. The experiential platform Avenida Desperados brought the campaign's Latin street-party energy into real European locations, as reported by The Drum, completing a through-the-line execution that moved coherently from a three-minute music video to a billboard to a live event.
The Beer with Latin Vibe earned significant recognition from the advertising industry's most authoritative juries. At Cannes Lions 2025, the campaign won a Gold Lion for Film Craft in the Casting category and a Silver Lion for Film Craft in the Original Music category, according to the Cannes Lions organisation. The casting award is particularly notable given the campaign's reliance on authentic Latin talent — OVY ON THE DRUMS and MICRO TDH — rather than celebrity proxies or actors performing cultural adjacency. The Silver Lion for Original Music reflects the fact that GUAO GUAO was composed specifically for the campaign, not licensed from an existing catalogue.
Beyond Cannes, the campaign was awarded a Pencil at D&AD 2025 in the Casting category, as confirmed by D&AD, and a Bronze Pencil at The One Show 2025, as listed by The One Club. Taken together, these results place The Beer with Latin Vibe among the most-decorated global campaigns of the first half of 2025 in the food and drink category.
No verified consumer performance data — including sales uplift figures, streaming numbers for GUAO GUAO, or brand tracking shifts in The Netherlands — is publicly available for independent citation. Structurally, however, the campaign's through-the-line architecture addresses the full consumer journey: cultural credibility established through music and talent, reach delivered through Spotify and out-of-home, engagement deepened through Snapchat AR, and community built through the Avenida Desperados experiential events. Each layer reinforces the others, which explains why the campaign's craft elements — casting, music, and film — performed strongly with award juries attuned to strategic coherence as much as execution. The Clapboard Score for this campaign is 78 out of 100.
The Beer with Latin Vibe is Desperados' 2025 global campaign, created by LePub Milan and launched on 31 January 2025. It centres on an original track called GUAO GUAO, made with Colombian producer OVY ON THE DRUMS and Venezuelan rapper MICRO TDH, and rolled out across more than 30 European markets including The Netherlands, per Ad Age.
OVY ON THE DRUMS is a Latin Grammy award-winning Colombian music producer who served as Artistic Director for the campaign. MICRO TDH is a Venezuelan rapper who co-created and performed GUAO GUAO alongside him. Both artists brought authentic Latin cultural credibility to the campaign, as documented in campaign materials cited by El Publicista and The Drum.
The campaign won a Gold Lion for Film Craft in the Casting category and a Silver Lion for Film Craft in the Original Music category at Cannes Lions 2025, according to the Cannes Lions organisation. It also received a Pencil at D&AD 2025 and a Bronze Pencil at The One Show 2025, per D&AD and The One Club respectively.
LePub Milan created The Beer with Latin Vibe for Desperados. MassiveMusic handled artist procurement and music supervision across the campaign. The collaboration produced an original track, a music video, out-of-home activations, a Snapchat AR experience, and the Avenida Desperados experiential platform across European markets including The Netherlands.
GUAO GUAO was produced by OVY ON THE DRUMS and performed with MICRO TDH specifically for Desperados. The accompanying music video, set in a grocery store transformed into a dance space, visualises the brand's belief that spontaneity and Latin energy can break everyday constraints — a direct expression of Desperados' 2025 repositioning, as reported by The Drum.
The campaign ran across more than 30 European markets, including The Netherlands, according to Ad Age. Distribution channels included Spotify, out-of-home placements, and a Snapchat augmented reality activation. The Avenida Desperados experiential platform extended the campaign into physical street events across Europe, as reported by The Drum.
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