Heineken wanted to reach out to its loyal customers during the holiday season. Although it enjoys more than 80% of the market share in the premium category, it wanted to celebrate the festive season with all the Lebanese.

The fact that beer is a seasonal drink mainly consumed in summer, the winter holidays were the perfect time to reconnect with loyal customers and further strengthen Heineken’s relationship with them.The strategy was simple: bring everyone together during the holidays to light up Christmas together. What started out as a simple outdoor campaign, developed into a one of a kind experience, never witnessed before in Lebanon. A giant Heineken bottle made of 1.8km of neon lights was constructed and placed one of the most high traffic areas in Lebanon. The bottle was missing its red and green colours. And it called on all Lebanese to visit www.coloryourchristmas.com to light it up. The microsite was directly synced to the giant bottle.

Over a period of 12 days, visitors engaged with the microsite from 1,132 cities from around the world covering 130 countries. Registering over 76m impressions through social networks.

The campaign ran for 12 days prior to Christmas and the location for the Giant Heineken bottle was carefully chosen and rightly situated in the busiest part of the city. In parallel, the microsite was launched on exactly the same day the bottle was set up. Through radio programming and simple BTL the campaign further pushed people to get online and light up the bottle before Christmas.The targeted online messages and people’s participation dramatically increased the campaigns reach; consequently, the objectives were met 1 day prior to the original schedule.

A third of Heineken’s yearly growth in 2011 happened in the month of December when we ran the Christmas campaign.ColorYourChristmas.com was monitored by Google Analytics and provided us with daily results. In only 12 days, and with an average time on site of 00:02:32, the microsite gathered 55,445 page views and visitors spread over 130 countries and 1,132 cities.

And it generated 76m impressions throughout social networks.