At their Rugby World Cup launch party at Somerset House, Heineken unveiled their big idea to engage fans during the tournament, “The Heineken Rugby Studio” – a real-time rugby show with some of the world’s most famous rugby players. Heineken would enhance match day for fans with a second-screen experience – sharing live content and interacting with fans as the action unfolded.

To position themselves ahead of other sponsors and enhance the tournament for fans, Heineken created the Heineken Rugby Hub, a website that pulled in the best content from social channels produced by Heineken’s studio at Twickenham Stadium. The hub was a destination for passionate fans to follow results as well as catch up on conversations, stories, and reactions from Heineken’s rugby legends, as well as celebrities interviewed in the Twickenham studio.

Heineken’s Rugby Hub pulled in the best content from social channels produced by Heineken’s purpose built studio at Twickenham Stadium. The hub provided a destination point for passionate fans to follow results, as well as catch up on conversation, stories and reactions from Heineken’s weekly Rugby show with rugby legends and celebrity guests.

To power the idea, we combined the high performance capabilities of Google App Engine, and the real-time data synchronisation capabilities of Firebase to create a unique, real-time publishing platform.

From inception to production, a small agile three-man team architected, designed, built and tested the whole platform in 4 weeks. We leveraged App Engine Modules - Web Services, Publishing Tools, Automated Workers and image manipulation.

App Engine orchestrated data feeds and content from multiple sources, auto creating articles that the content teams could curate and re-purpose rapidly to deliver compelling and exclusive content. We also added an App Client framework, built on AngularJS, that delivered an elegant Responsive Adaptive Design in the form of a single page with infinite scroll, making for an app-like experience for the web.

Through this setup our teams could publish topical and exclusive Heineken content, in real-time, to live audiences around the world in 5 key markets (UK, NZ, AU, IE, ZA).

Over the entire campaign the Heineken Rugby Hub received 247,440 unique visits

It was front of mind in the build-up as fans visited throughout the week leading up to matches on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. By the end of the tournament each day in the week had received over 25,000 unique visits.

Heineken’s Rugby Hub and investment in digital not only paid off in its sales results – a 19% year-on-year uplift in weekly sales volume throughout the tournament, but importantly in its sponsorship, as Heineken was voted the no.1 recall sponsor. (2/3)

Over the entire campaign the Heineken Rugby Hub received 247,440 unique visits.

It was front of mind in the build-up as fans visited throughout the week leading up to matches on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. By the end of the tournament each day the site had received over 25,000 unique visits.

The Rugby Hub was a trusted destination for fans throughout the tournament right up until the final, with over 20,000 unique visits each week

Heineken built authority with its content, as fans visited the site for its quality coverage around matches. Visits peaked around match days, with 37.5% of total visits taking place at the weekend.

Heineken’s Rugby Hub and investment in digital not only paid off in its sales results – a 19% year-on-year uplift in weekly sales volume throughout the tournament – but importantly Heineken was voted the no.1 recall sponsor. (2/3)