For Gen Z games are the best place to socialize. But there's one thing gamers find irritating: matchmaking. The algorithm is pretty bad for you to find the ideal partner to play with. This results in gamers playing with partners with different skill levels, spoiling the gaming experience.

If matchmaking doesn’t work very well, it’s a socialization pain for gamers. So, no one is better to solve this problem than a brand that has helped matching people for 150 years. So, Heineken decided to help gamers to find ideal partners to play online in the same way they have matched people outside the game: with beer. Literally. So, we designed unique Heineken bottles for several game genres with a QR code on them. Gamers just needed to scan it to match with someone who chose the same bottle.

The strategy of the project was to unite the gaming community over a beer. To do this we had to find a relevant consumer insight for Heineken. By noticing that matchmaking was one problem gamers face, and one seldom addressed, we knew we could create a project to solve this. So we created a limited edition to matchmake gamers through a QR Code. There were 4 different bottles, each one representing a game genre, that redirected them to a gaming match platform. There we collected gamer data and matched them according to skill levels. We started by matching well-known gaming influencers, and they naturally introduced the new tool to their followers.

We changed the design of our bottles to bring in elements of game genres like FPS, RPG, and Sports and launched them in supermarkets across Brazil. These bottles contained a QR code that enabled gamers to scan and find people who had chosen that same bottle. Through an online website we built from scratch, gamers could fill their information to instantly get matched with a new friend.

Heineken Beer Matchmaking became more than a limited edition, it ended up becoming a permanent platform to help gamers.

- More than 35,478 gamers matched.

- The limited edition sold out in less than a week.

- The number of gamers has increased by 15%.