In recent years there’s been a rise in hustle culture—a trend that promotes work above all other areas of life—including time with loved ones. This has created unrealistic expectations, shifting the work-life balance to all work.

Because of this, beer consumption at bars amongst friends has dropped. People are constantly bailing on friends to work later.

So, we needed to create a campaign that got the attention of young Canadian professionals currently partaking in hustle culture, forcing them to take a break from their overwork. Our campaign goals were to generate earned media impressions, & PR pickup.

We wanted to create a campaign that would directly target Canada's largest hustle influencer, causing her to rethink her overwork and finally take a break for a Heineken with a friend, while encouraging other Canadians suffering from overwork to do the same.

For this campaign we wanted to connect with ambitious young professionals (25-34) in a way that was authentic to them, which is why we partnered with Canada’s most ambitious young professional, Michele Romanow.

Using a nationally recognized talent like Michele was pivotal to our campaign for two reasons. The first reason was that it helped us create buzz through earned media and specifically target young professionals. The second reason was that it created a spokesperson for overworking.

By showing someone as busy as Michele advocating for less-overworking it made everyday Canadians feel that they are able to take control of their professional lives and #WorkResponsibly.

To turn Canada’s biggest hustle influencer into an anti-hustle influencer we kicked off the campaign with a 10m projection right outside of Michele Romanow’s office. The message came from Michele’s friend Matt who she was consistently bailing on for work. We filmed her reaction to the surprise projection and turned it into an IG Reel.

We then allowed everyone in Canada to call out their own overworking friends. All they had to do was comment on our IG post with a message to their always-bailing friends to meet up for a Heineken. We then displayed these messages at Yonge Dundas Square.

Then, we hyper targeted billboards in the parts of the country that are known for overworking like Bay Street in Toronto and Burrard Street in Vancouver. Each billboard had a message encouraging Canadians to turn off their computer after 5 and meet up with a friend for a Heineken.

The campaign generated 21M earned media impressions, 18K social engagements and over 700K influencer impressions. The total impressions for the campaign netted out at 175M. But the biggest impact Heineken had was increasing the amount of friends who met up for a beer and decreased the amount of overwork.