In Vietnam’s young, highly competitive, fast growing beer market, Heineken Original was aging fast. One of the most visible signs was our packaging. Brands winning with young adults had already shifted to sleek (tall & slim) cans. Heineken was still holding onto the traditional (short & fat) one. We realized, to change their perception of us, we had to change our cans first.

Heineken pioneered music in Vietnam with huge offline events. The launch of our new can was the perfect opportunity to reignite our relationship with music, but this time we would focus more on a mobile led experience. 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?

While the launch of a new SLEEK 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 experience and disrupt previous launch conventions, not only on shelf but by harnessing the power of technology to elevate our music partnership with Spotify into a first of its kind integration that would give us an edge in the cluttered landscape of mobile music streaming partnerships.

Letter Recognition AI and AR Algorithms transformed every can into a personalized experience. When users scanned the can, every turn of the logo unlocked an exciting new audio-visual journey. The different two letter combinations enabled our audience to add artists’ names that matched the two letters to create their own unique playlist enabling the brand’s access to a roster of artists that would have been impossible to sign individually.

The Audio-Visual Augmented Reality experience is crafted to match different tempos of tracks ranging from classical to techno music. The 2 visible letters match the artist and play the music of those artists during the AR engagement. The 4 variations of 3D AR animations are designed in a way to match a wide range of music genres and varying tempos for more than 583 world famous artists when matched with the 2 letters on the Heineken Sleek Can.

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 witnessed 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 livestream views and over-achieving our campaign target metrics by over 210%.