Heineken Juke

Every conversation about the Heineken brand begins with…. “We don’t sell beer, we sell experiences”. This one-of-a-kind launch for the sleek can was conceived to transform our most powerful owned media property, our cans into an immersive, personalized experience for music and beer lovers across the country. JUKE was a perfect strategic partnership with an unexpected engagement mechanic which created an unforgettable experience for our audience that went viral in Vietnam.

Heineken, one of the oldest beer brands was aging fast in Asia’s fastest-growing beer market with an emerging younger beer-drinking audience. Open any convenience store fridge in Vietnam and there is a good chance (whether you’re reaching for a beer or not) you will end up with a sleek can in hand. While the launch of a new can was a big thing for us, it wasn’t a big deal to young drinkers. If we wanted to send a signal that this was more than just a simple packaging change, we would have to elevate the drinking experience and look at this from an entirely new angle.

We started with a simple observation. No matter what angle you look at the sleek can, only two letters of the brand name are visible. What if we could find a way to let our drinkers play with these two-letter combinations and match them to the names of some of the hottest local and international artists? . The execution makes HEINEKEN SLEEK CANs magically transform into a DJ turn table to create their own mix of music and listen, while they sip their beer on the world’s largest music platform, Spotify using AI Letter recognition and Augmented Reality.

Forming a first-of-its-kind partnership with Spotify, giving the brand unprecedented access to a roster of artists that would have been impossible to sign individually. The experience was enabled by bespoke technology, including Letter Recognition AI and an AR algorithm that transformed every can into a personalized virtual concert. When users scanned the can, every turn of the logo unlocked an exciting new audio-visual experience. The different two-letter combinations enabled our audience to add artists’ names that matched the two letters to create their own unique playlist, creating an additional layer of engagement with the brand.

The results were off the charts. Over the campaign period we sold 23.3 million Heineken Sleek Cans which translated into a 40% growth rate vs the previous year. Users spent 5,200,000 hours listening to Heineken-generated music tracks, and from an engagement standpoint we witness an unprecedented 546,000 shared playlists across social media platforms which smashed all expectations…. everything else was music to our ears, including the 25.2 million reach, 7.4 million engagements, 3 million live stream views and over-achieving our campaign target metrics by over 210%.