Heineken: Refreshing & Reachable

How does the top-selling beer brand keep coming up with ads that leave others staring at the bottom of an empty glass? Belinda Archer raises a green glass bottle to Heineken and its multinational approach to creating the top spots

I could so easily do one of those clichéd old intros about Heineken’s advertising – you know, along the lines of how it ‘refreshes the parts that other campaigns cannot reach’ or something. But hey, I’m not going to do that. Or wait… maybe I just did?

Heineken is, you see, unavoidably synonymous with its most memorable campaigns. Aside from Lowe’s fabled UK work from the 70s and 80s – the most-loved execution of which featured a Sloaney girl learning to say “the worta in Majorca don’t taste like what it oughta” in an impeccable Cockney accent after sipping some Heineken – there was the excellent mid-90s Publicis US campaign under the strapline, ‘It’s all about the beer’.

Advertising is in its DNA

There have also been strong individual pieces of work executed locally, such as the JWT Italia campaign in Italy where men were invited by their womenfolk to the opera on the night of a UEFA Champions League game (Heineken being sponsor of the league), to be met with a giant screening of the big match itself, in rather more exotic surroundings than usual. Another highpoint, in 2005, by Publicis New York again, featured Jennifer Aniston in a spot in which she asks a shop assistant to lift down a pack of Heineken for her, only to find he keeps it for himself.

Heineken did, of course, help to reinvent the lager market internationally, with its mould-breaking green bottles (when all others were brown) and unique distribution through smaller, unusual outlets. Today it is the number one premium beer globally, with a market share of 20 per cent, way ahead of its closest rival, Corona.

But not only did it inject new life into male drinking, it also pioneered the use of wit and sophistication in beer communications, and advertising itself has been a crucial component in establishing the brand’s dominant position.

Cyril Charzat, senior director global Heineken brand for the past three years, comments: “Advertising has been a key element of the success of the brand, especially in the 70s and 80s. It’s part of its DNA. We have built our success through this, as well as through our innovative design, distribution into premium outlets, and the high quality of our beer.”

Developing a global strategy

Citing the Jennifer Aniston ad as a favourite, he adds: “From a very early stage we were strongly focused on the image of the brand, when others were focused on the product, and advertising, especially wit in advertising, was crucial.”

The brand entered into its latest advertising incarnation in 2009, when Heineken hired Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam. The agency was briefed not just to maintain Heineken’s dizzy creative heights, but to apply them in a global context. It is now in charge of the big ideas and the big strategic thinking for Heineken internationally.

Eric Quennoy, Wieden’s joint executive creative director who shares responsibility for the global Heineken account with Mark Bernath, explains the specific brief from the lager manufacturer: “The big thing for them was that they were doing lots of fragmented work across the world, in the US and Europe, and with the UK separate within that. The thinking was to come up with a big idea that everyone could rally behind. This had been lacking over the past five or so years. Heineken had a history of great work, but it was very market-specific and not global.”

The agency came up with the Open Your World campaign, which kicked off with The Entrance in December 2010, a fabulous film shot by Fredrik Bond featuring a ‘typical’ Heineken drinker making an impossibly cool entrance to a ritzy international party. Quennoy says the strategy was to shift the gaze from the beer to the drinker: “It’s about flattering the drinker and celebrating the men who drink the product. It’s about showing off this man of the world who has exceptional taste and style.”

To avoid making him too perfect, however, the film, together with its follow-up The Date (also shot by Bond), features moments of awkwardness where the guy stumbles or pulls some laughably silly Kung Fu moves.

Keeping one foot in the past

W+K, as guardians of this new global strategy, are the first sole agency to be handed such a task by Heineken. The advertiser uses other agencies locally, but they are adopting the W+K work and adapting it for their particular markets. Indeed, it is now running in 50 separate countries, whereas in the past the brand ran different executions around the world, with the occasional local campaign breaking through and running internationally, such as the entertaining Dutch TBWA/Neboko Walking Fridge spot of early 2009.

Charzat observes how the new work and new thinking moves on from Heineken’s previous advertising, but also pays homage to its past.

“Part of the brand personality is to be progressive and innovative. That is what we want to do with our marketing, and the Open Your World campaign fits with that. Advertising has always been very important within our marketing, but here we are putting much more attention on the production values. These are world-class executions by Fredrik, and they were very important to re-establish the premiumness of the brand. However, they are still in line with our communications from the past, with the humour and the light-hearted tone of voice,” he says.

Perhaps not surprisingly, given the success of the films, everything seems very chummy between agency and client.

“We really are enjoying a great collaboration with them, which feels very mutual,” beams Bernath. “I don’t feel like we are navigating politics or second-guessing. It is all transparent and open, and that’s kind of rare. And the work is definitely the result of the relationship being so good. It feels fun, because it is fun.”

It is also a mutual process, with client and agency respecting one another’s roles while at the same time being highly collaborative.

Charzat says: “My team is quite closely involved with the agency. We evolve everything together. That is what makes it a success – the collaborative nature, with everyone working together to push creativity.”

Bond joins in the love-fest. “I have been fortunate with such an amazing creative client and agency on this campaign, all of whom are really hard workers who put egos aside and push the work right to the top. The client has been very much involved with us through the entire process. It has never been divided camps between us. It’s such a pleasure and a way more effective process when you can truly work in a team.”

A brand with soul

Already the new work has garnered much critical praise, with The Entrance landing gold Lions at Cannes this summer for best direction and best film, as well as a gold at the Clios, and The Date (which is yet to enter all the advertising awards) awarded a bronze Lion. The Date has also notched up 8 million hits on YouTube, while the company’s own market research has shown the new work having a “very positive effect” on brand attributes in the USA, Greece and Italy and “very strong engagement” with people when they watch it. Most important of all, the client is happy.

So what is it about Heineken that makes it capable of scaling such creative heights? Is it the brand itself, or the fact that it is a beer brand, both of which are fun, creatively rich advertising sectors?

“Heineken is such a huge, iconic brand, and it would be a shame if its advertising didn’t live up to that scale and notoriety,” says Bernath. “Beers and sports brands are also things that people are passionate about and things that people enjoy most, and that is reflected in the advertising.”

Quennoy adds: “It is a brand with a fabulous DNA. From the outset Heineken had a great ambition to be global and not just a small Dutch beer. There is something very social to it too. There is a lovely soul to the brand.”

A daunting legacy

As for the past, and the brand’s somewhat hard-to-follow creative history, the pair airily dismiss the idea that this is a problem.

“Having a legacy of great work is daunting, but not a burden,” asserts Quennoy. “It’s exciting. People are predisposed to liking us, which is a good thing – they are expecting ‘the next great Heineken ad’. It is daunting, but rather that than something that has not done anything good before.”

Bond adds: “It’s a complete honour and privilege that they trust me to bring what I can to their strong brand. I always feel very respectful of that. Its history fuels me with energy and ideas.”

Looking ahead, new campaigns have just broken for the Rugby World Cup and the Champions League, which do not yet quite fall into the Open Your World strategy, but increasingly will do. Charzat reveals that the sponsorship work will move closer and closer to the new voice of the brand “because it is so relevant and successful”.

And will Bond be shooting a third film for them? Charzat refuses to be pinned down, saying tantalisingly: “I would like there to be another.”

It’s a collective magic that certainly works well and looks set to unify the brand’s communications in years to come. It refreshes the parts, dare I say, that previous Heineken advertising possibly failed to reach.

The new generation of communication

In April 2011 Heineken briefed social media specialists AKQA to “give the brand a role in the UEFA Champions League that makes the experience of watching the world’s best club football even better”.

What AKQA came up with was a solution that powered Heineken into the forefront of cutting-edge digital thinking, as well as exploiting its role as sponsors of the Champions League more fully. It was a video game app called Star Player that harnessed dual-screen interaction and allowed the user, via their iPhone or iPod Touch, to play the game while watching the football live on their TV. 

This amounted to branded entertainment, with each play in the game branded a ‘Heineken match moment’, but it also tied in on a wider scale with all the Heineken on-pitch advertising and half-time TV ads, giving viewers a complete Heineken experience.

Nick Bailey, executive creative director of the Amsterdam AKQA office, who led the StarPlayer project, comments: “We knew whatever we did had to be social – after all, watching football is better with mates – and something that didn’t distract viewers from the game itself.”

So far the innovative app has proved a great success, with downloads hitting tens of thousands globally, triggered only by casual discovery or word of mouth.

Bailey attributes this to the app’s longevity because it creates a “full hour-and-a-half of intense, non-stop brand engagement, repeated every match day”. 

He credits the client with helping to create this innovative piece of brand communication.

“Star Player could only have been created in partnership with a client 100 per cent committed to innovation. That means committed to exploiting new ways to connect with consumers, whether through technology, a new consumer behaviour (dual-screening, for example) or a combination of both. It’s about thinking beyond ‘digital’ as a platform or channel, and treating each brief as an opportunity to do something completely new.”

Star Player is back, too, in multiple languages and across multiple platforms, for the start of the new Champions League. And it would appear there is even more of this kind of stuff from Heineken/AKQA in the pipeline. Watch this cyber space.