2012 Winners & Shortlists

The Campaign

Heineken wanted to reach out to its loyal customers during the holiday season. Although it enjoys more than 80% of the market share in the premium category, it wanted to celebrate the festive season with all the Lebanese. The fact that beer is a seasonal drink mainly consumed in summer, the winter holidays were the perfect time to reconnect with loyal customers and further strengthen Heineken’s relationship with them. The strategy was simple bring everyone together over a beer during the holidays. What started out as a simple outdoor, developed into a one of a kind experience, never witnessed before in Lebanon. A giant Heineken bottle made of 1.8km of neon lights was constructed and placed one of the most high traffic areas in Lebanon. The bottle was missing its red and green colors. And it called on all Lebanese to visit www.coloryourchristmas.com to light it up. The website was directly synced to the giant bottle. Over a period of 12 days more than 30,000 unique visitors engaged with the site from 1,132 cities from around the world covering 130 countries. Registering over 76 million impressions through social networks.

The Brief

Deepen and strengthen the relationship with loyal customers through the “open your world” platform. The purpose of the campaign was to make them directly experience “the worldly beer” by going beyond daily interactions into worldly connections. Through targeted online messaging and Google Analytics we almost hand-picked the target audience and directly engaged with them.

Results

A third of Heineken’s yearly growth in 2011 happened in the month of December when we ran the Christmas campaign. ColorYourChristmas.com was monitored by Google Analytics and provided us with daily results. In only 12 days, and with an average time on site of 00:02:32, the website gathered 55,445 page views and over 30,000 unique visitors spread over 130 countries and 1,132 cities. And it generated 76 million impressions throughout social networks.

Execution

The campaign ran for 12 days prior to Christmas and the location for the Giant Heineken bottle was carefully chosen and rightly situated in the busiest part of the city. In parallel, the site was launched on exactly the same day the bottle was setup. Through radio programming and simple BTL the campaign further pushed people to get online and light up the bottle before Christmas. The targeted online messages and people’s participation dramatically increased the campaigns reach; consequently, the objectives were met one day prior to the original schedule.

The Situation

Heineken enjoys more than 80% market share in the premium segment in Lebanon. And as an international brand it needed to maintain a solid and positive relationship with its customers. Additionally, with the rise of new local beer brands riding on the patriotic platform, a PR campaign was needed to impress Heineken’s new payoff “open your world”.

The Strategy

The campaign was originally planned to run as a simple outdoor but after identifying the full potential of ‘open your world’ we built a full PR activity. That provided us with a good launching platform for the 2012 calendar.