Our Heineken 150 year campaign proves your brand anniversary doesn’t need to be boring

But it is possible for an anniversary campaign to escape the curse of navel-gazing, resonate with real people, and pick up gongs left right and center. Heineken recently won a Grand Prix, a gold and a silver Lion in the direct category, and a bronze Lion in creative strategy at Cannes Lions for our '150 years of Whateverken’ campaign, as well as three Kantar Creative Effectiveness Awards in May – the only ad industry awards where consumers are the jury.

This puts us in the perfect position to discuss creating an anniversary campaign that your marketing team is passionate about, the industry applauds, and consumers love.

Root your idea in how people really interact with your brand

Step one has to be coming up with the right idea. Our research told us clearly that consumers, particularly Gen Z, couldn’t care less about brand anniversaries. And telling them how old Heineken was didn’t seem like a great way to win them over either.

We knew that an introspective, brand-focussed idea wouldn’t cut through. It needed to be a big idea that leaned into the brand’s role in people’s lives. Heineken is not in the beer business after all: it’s in the business of good times.

We worked through several different concepts before landing on the idea – based on the insight that Heineken is the world’s most misspelled beer brand. We decided to celebrate our anniversary by leaning into how people saw and used the brand. We also loved how the idea had so many applications beyond just an ad, all based on the foundational idea that people all over the world mistreated our brand by misspelling it, misusing it and mispronouncing it.

Take the idea beyond a paid media campaign

This leads us to step two, thinking broader than an ad campaign. We knew we needed to pair the idea with the right execution – one that wasn’t just in a media plan but hit every touchpoint, right through to the signage on bars and the labels on bottles. This was important, so we properly included our consumers in the celebrations, meeting them where they are.

We changed our global labeling production to use all the brand’s misspellings and nicknames from all over the world. The idea was carried across beer trucks, bar signs, beer taps, social media handles and more. A global TV campaign, OOH and social content celebrated people mistreating our brand for the sake of good times. People misspelling Heineken online got special promos, and we activated every market with local top spins activations, including exclusive collaborations with Slowboy, MSGM, Monopoly and more.

Radical collaboration between global and local markets was another way we ensured we stayed true to the brief. We had a sounding board of markets throughout the development process and operated in true partnership with the in-house teams and agencies across research, design, media, influencers and so on.

We had an incredibly long list of partners and agencies involved including lead creative agency Lepub, alongside Dentsu, Kantar, Edelman, Billion Dollar Boy, Sunshine and Sausages, Superunion, Boomerang, Unit 9, Partners in Production and DASS. As the concept evolved, we stayed super close to keep each other honest and “on point” to preserve the sanctity of the idea and ensure it came to life cohesively across the ecosystem while flexing to capture local nuance.

Deliver on the idea’s full potential to resonate with real people

Step three was using an evidence-based approach to bring the best possible executions of the campaign to market.

The Heineken team had full confidence in the idea, but equally important was what resonated with real people. With such a global scope, striking a chord with people in different parts of the world and on different platforms was key. This was Heineken’s most global campaign ever – so we knew a one-size-fits-all approach wouldn’t work. At the core, we understood that people cannot connect with an ad that they don’t understand, so when you are aiming to create a campaign that connects with people, it’s difficult to do that using the same execution in different markets.

So, Kantar and Heineken partnered to test different variants of the creative to see what worked in different markets, using facial coding technology to understand what actually made consumers laugh. This meant we could customize our global assets to ensure they hit all the right notes and were understood by our audience. This is how we ended up developing 500 global assets as part of the campaign, with built-in flexibility for further localization.

So, for a full year, Heineken, being Heineken, embraced all of the misspellings, mispronunciations and misuses of our brand by people all over the world so that everyone could enjoy our products and join the celebrations in their own way. Even though brand strategists might advise against it, loosening some of our strict “Heineken guidelines” was a great business decision. People loved it so much that we saw a significant uplift in brand power over the campaign period.

That strong voice of the consumer and the laser focus on what would make this land with real people where they are meant that we brought the best possible versions of our campaign to market – and didn’t greenlight an anniversary campaign that was only of interest to ourselves.

We are delighted the Cannes Lions jury agreed.