Vol 135: Budweiser: One second ads sparks strike 🎵

Case Studied
A Grand Prix and a copyright loophole

Brands have always borrowed music to sell products. In the streaming era, that borrowing got a lot more aggressive, and award shows have gotten more generous about rewarding it.

Budweiser leaned further into that shift than most beer brands. It's one of the most active live music sponsors of any consumer brand, pairing Spotify tie-ins and free Twitch tracks with a push toward younger, more diverse audiences beyond its usual sports sponsorships. Its Brazilian unit took that music strategy a step further with a TikTok campaign built entirely around one-second song clips.

This week, Case Studied explores how Budweiser's "One Second Ads" campaign won advertising's biggest prize, then became a public dispute over unpaid music rights.

The Brief

Budweiser started as an American beer in 1876. It went global in 2008, when Belgium's InBev acquired Anheuser-Busch to form AB InBev. Today, it's one of the world's most valuable beer brands. 

Historically, AB InBev also invests more on live music sponsorship than any other beverage brand. It accounts for just over half of the industry’s $1.54 billion spent each year on North American music tours, festivals, and venues.

In keeping with that music trend, Budweiser's Brazilian team set out to build a music-focused campaign in 2025. Inspired by the insight that real fans only need one note to recognize a song, the team used that knowledge as a foundation for their campaign.

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The Execution

Budweiser worked with São Paulo-based agency Africa Creative DDB to build "One Second Ads," a social-first campaign. Each ad ran exactly one second, just the opening note or beat of a globally recognizable track, from Beyoncé to Kendrick Lamar to Foo Fighters, and users had to identify the song to claim a coupon.

For this kind of campaign, TikTok was a natural fit. Music is built into nearly every post there, and the format already trains people to watch very short clips. Africa Creative told Ad Forum the platform let the team "target the right people with the right ads, based on the genres they interact with most," so a rock fan saw a rock clip and a pop fan saw a pop clip.

The campaign’s case study video that was submitted for Cannes Lions judging included a line about the format's other benefit: the one-second length was, as the agency put it, "the maximum allowed without paying for music rights." That line described a major cost saving but it also amounted to a public claim about copyright law.

The Results

Africa Creative reported 119% more views than industry benchmark and more than 68 million impressions in the first two weeks. The jury at Cannes was won over. The campaign won the Grand Prix in Audio & Radio at Cannes Lions, advertising's top prize. Jury president Xolisa Dyeshana, Chief Creative Officer at Joe Public, called the work "exceptionally creative, insightful, and fresh," adding that "the execution was flawless."

The win is what pulled the case study into wider public view. The campaign didn't break any of Cannes Lions' formal competition rules, but the reaction outside the festival was less forgiving. Sony Music Publishing filed a copyright claim once the case study circulated, and the video was pulled from YouTube. Audio Branding CMO Shez Mehra summed up the criticism on LinkedIn: "The jury didn't reward creativity. They rewarded loopholes (which don't exist)." AB InBev's Brazilian unit, Ambev, apologized in a statement to Ad Age: "We deeply respect artists and hear the concern... We're sorry and are working to resolve this."

Separately from the competition's own rules, the underlying legal claim is disputed. There's no length exemption written into music copyright law that makes one second automatically safe. Courts, including the European Court of Justice in a case involving the band Kraftwerk, have held that even brief sampling can require licensing regardless of duration.

The Takeaways

1) Build around recognition cues.

The campaign rested on a real cognitive quirk. People can identify a familiar song from a fraction of a second, because the brain matches incoming sound against memory almost instantly and fills in the rest automatically. Africa Creative treated that quirk as the entire creative brief, stripping each ad down to just enough audio to trigger recognition.

The smallest reliable trigger in a category, a color, a jingle fragment, a shape, can carry significant weight. We saw this recently with Heinz ketchup being recognizable at World Cup stadiums, despite the label being taped over. Sometimes, stripping a format down forces active recall instead of passive viewing, and that recall can help make an ad stand out.

2) Match the format to how the platform is already being watched.

A one-second ad wouldn’t necessarily work as a cable TV commercial. But it works on a platform where viewers are already trained on extremely short clips. TikTok's whole interface assumes people are used to seeing tiny videos back-to-back. That helped the format feel native.

Whether a format reads as fluent or as a glitch depends on whether the platform’s audience is primed for that length. The same idea can land completely differently depending on where it runs. Consider what could make your campaign feel platform-native, while still standing out. 

3) Triple check legal copyright requirements. 

Africa Creative's case study described the one-second length as "the maximum allowed without paying for music rights." The campaign broke no Cannes Lions rule by saying it. But the accolades the campaign received at Cannes quickly prompted legal action by Sony, which stated that no such “one-second rule” exists. 

Many critics of the One Second Ads campaign call the “one-second-rule” a myth. Don't let an internal read of copyright law double as your compliance check, especially once that claim becomes part of your pitch or case study. Have any language about licensing exemptions, fair use, or length thresholds reviewed by a legal or licensing specialist before it's written into creative materials. 

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