Ever wonder how you refresh one of the world’s biggest beer brands? Launch Heineken Silver - the first major innovation on its namesake since 2019.

Silver was created to meet the need for a refreshing low carb, low cal premium light beer combatting Heineken misconceptions with modern tastemakers who want all the taste, no bitterness. 

To Heineken’s audience, peak bitterness is being disconnected to culture and friends. Bitterness is also amplified in entertainment, media and life-in-general with things like season finales of TV shows, the end of a sports season, finishing college and even the “Sunday scaries”. Heineken’s approach was to make bitter ending moments better by identifying them, surrounding them with attention driving media, and ultimately leaving the audience with a positive experience.

The audience is the cornerstone of their social circles. Culturally curious and adventure-seeking, new experiences help them gain a sense of accomplishment and status within their friend groups. They lean into fun, trending content in the entertainment, gaming, and music spaces as well as keeping up on serious matters and current events. While they’re heavy users of digital mediums, they consume a wide variety of media and seek rich experiences as much as possible. Heineken served up the perfect solution to not only reach this audience but connect with them on a personal level with a powerhouse, cross-channel campaign delivered on a national and local level complete with teaser, launch and sustain phases. Media activity focused on three key goals:

Creating mass awareness of Silver

Increasing brand consideration and favorability

Capturing newly created demand

To create mass awareness, some campaigns measure their total impression delivery in millions. Heineken poured out over 3 billion ads across Linear/CTV/Online Video, Terrestrial and Streaming Audio, Paid Social, Programmatic Display, Search, Out of Home, Sponsorships, Branded Content and Experiential.

Impression weight can’t solely drive consideration and favorability. Heineken Silver had a presence you couldn’t miss at the biggest cultural tentpoles of the year starting with Coachella, the official launchpad of the new beer, followed by exposure at buzzworthy events like the three Formula 1 races, including the Heineken Silver Grand Prix in Las Vegas, and the US Open.

Silver founds its way into conversational content moments on platforms such as Late Night w Seth Meyers, Jimmy Kimmel Live, Whistle Sports, 3Blackdot, Betches and even the Real Housewives put down their wine and picked up their new favorite beer.

During the launch phase alone, awareness jumped +16%. The ultimate mix of media and creative targeted to the audience’s passion points led to spikes in favorability as high as +13 points, coupled with increases in engagement rates jumping +34%, commonplace in a campaign that amplified talent-driven content leading to a 2x jump in positive brand mentions on social media. The campaign also led to action. In search, the Silver brand campaign outperformed the Heineken brand campaign including spikes in performance for purchase-related keywords. And perhaps the most telling of all metrics was the team’s ability to show a +0.89 (strong) correlation between media exposure and increases in sales volume. In the end, Heineken succeeded in establishing Silver as a World Class Light Beer putting more cans in more hands - with All the Taste, No Bitter endings.