Building on Heineken’s brand line: “Open Your World”, we made it our goal to open up Rugby World Cup 2015 to fans across the globe. We created a social campaign with live content designed to bring both casual fans and fanatics closer to the action – whether they were watching at home or pitch-side at Twickenham Stadium.

With an eight-week long tournament, the opportunity to learn and adapt every step of the way was huge – the entire team, including creative agency, media agency and client, met weekly to review the data from the weekend matches and agree changes, new tests and shifts in media strategy.

Armed with a legendary line-up of global rugby players including Will Carling, Jonah Lomu and Matt Dawson, we connected with fans throughout the tournament, providing them with an exclusive second-screen experience. Each week from our purpose-built Heineken Rugby Studio at Twickenham Stadium we created and posted content in real-time on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Heineken’s own site.

The result was data-driven improvements to our formats, placement, volume and content over the tournament. It also resulted in massive uplifts across all key measures for content consumption & engagement.

With just 1% of the total match viewing audience able to get tickets to the game, we focused our efforts on the 99% watching from home – targeting armchair rugby fans and fanatics among our audience of 21–35 year old men.

The Rugby World Cup was set to be the most talked about rugby event in history, so to connect with our audience we looked to social media and Twitter – the platform we knew they interacted with before, during and after rugby matches.

To create awareness of Heineken’s presence at Rugby World Cup 2015 before it began, we leveraged the coin toss sponsorship to bring fans closer to Heineken, and closer to the action. To engage an even wider audience and involve them on match day we brought them closer to the action through influencers and a new way to experience the Rugby World Cup – putting social data and insights at the heart of our content production.

After the first 3 weeks, we saw our peak improvement in complete video views on Twitter – up 38% week on week – this increased throughout, but the biggest improvements came early on. (1)

By week 4, we hit an engagement index growth spike of 129 week on week. (2)

Media efficiencies and strategy changes led to a compound audience increase of +11% week on week (3)

Each week after the first match we fed insights into creative production of our Twitter content and the engagement rate increased by 13% on average over the tournament (4)

Optimising our videos brought more fans in and they watched more content. In total they spent 1.9 million minutes with Heineken videos across Twitter, Facebook and YouTube (5)

Overall, our second-screen experience with legendary rugby players elevated Heineken above the crowd of sponsors – resulting in 67 million paid and earned impressions across Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. (6)

Heineken’s success drove a 19% year-on-year uplift in weekly sales, but most importantly, Heineken was voted the no.1 recall sponsor, achieving its tournament ambition. (7/8)