After 4+ years of waiting for 2022's World Cup, the most-watched sporting event in the world returned to bring fans joy, pride, love, and hate. Yes, hate, in the form of the dreaded Virtual Assistant Referee, better known as the VAR, a technology that lets referees reevaluate close goals and plays to make sure they were decided correctly. Even though it technically makes the sport fairer, many fans despise the way it interrupts the game’s flow, and the way it can absolutely kill the mood in a room after it nullifies a goal everyone was just celebrating seconds ago.

But whether you respect it or detest it, the VAR is here to stay and is now part of the football game-watching experience, just as much as wearing your team’s jersey and drinking beer. Here, Miller Lite saw an opportunity to connect true football fans through their love for the game.

In Spanish, VAR and “bar” are homonyms. “El VAR” is pronounced exactly like “el bar” you visit to drink beer. So as the entire world was complaining about the VAR, Miller Lite reacted in real-time to create the Open VAR.

The rules were simple. In activations across bars in San Juan, Puerto Rico that were playing World Cup games, every time a referee called for a VAR review, fans could enjoy Miller Lite on the house for the duration of the review. Now whenever it’s VAR time, it’s Miller Time.

As football fans, we had no choice. Apparently we had to learn to live with the VAR. But, as one of the world’s most popular light beers, Miller Lite knows a thing or two about enhancing the way we watch sports. And this time, it created a new way to take a lemon and make lemonade. If the VAR was here to stay, why not learn to love it? Or at least love to hate it? So during World Cup game transmissions in Puerto Rico, we came up with a rule of our own.

During the Quarter-Finals, Semi-Finals, and the Final of the 2022 World Cup, we set up Miller Lite booths across some of the most visited sports bars chains in San Juan, Puerto Rico: Eco’s Sports Bars and 24 Marketplace. Every time the referee called for a VAR review during a game, a promoter in the booth called for an Open VAR at the bar. For the duration of the VAR review, fans at the bar could go to the booth and claim a free Miller Lite.

A TV, outdoor, digital, and social media campaign drove fans to the bars highlighting the places and times you could go to participating bars and enjoy Miller Lite every time a VAR review was called.

The campaign had a 50% reach among Puerto Rican football fans, with an engagement rate 6x higher than the median. Our video content accumulated over 500,000 organic views in just a week. Miller Lite’s social media platforms saw a +275% jump in interactions. It was the most shared campaign about the 2022 World Cup in Puerto Rico.