To increase visibility for women's football and address its significant gender gap, Heineken turned traditional OOH billboards into an outdoor live entertainment activation.

Out-Of-Home Matches brought the concept of video, which is heavily explored in TV and internet advertising, to outdoor media turning more than 3,500 high-traffic OOHs into giant screens that broadcast UCWL matches.

An innovative approach, PR stunt, in a channel that not only has high visibility, but also significant penetration and affinity among Heineken's target audience resulted in more than R$ 52 million in earned media, reaching over 25 million people.

Football is huge worldwide. Huge audiences, huge celebrities, huge investments and a HUGE GENDER GAP.

When you think of football, you think of a men’s sport. That's the stereotype.

Women's football struggles to gain visibility, therefore importance. They receive less than 1% of the investment of men's football, and with limited media coverage sponsors simply don't invest in female sport.

Broadcasting rights payments reveals this disparity. The average payment for the Men's World Cup is 26 times that of the Women's World Cup.

In 2021, to fight the invisibility of women's football, Heineken, the official sponsor of the UCL for over 20 years, began sponsoring the UWCL, a tournament that has been taking place since 2001 but lacks the same level of recognition.

But that still didn't seem enough.

SOURCE:

https://exame.com/esporte/quem-sao-os-atletas-mais-bem-pagos-do-mundo-em-2023-veja-ranking/

While UCL games have huge audiences, bringing crowds to bars, UWCL struggles for airtime on Brazilian TV channels.

How could people cheer for the Women's Champions League if they don't even have a place to watch it?

If the games aren't broadcast, no one watches or gets involved, and investing in them may not seem profitable. This creates a vicious cycle where potential fans never have the opportunity to engage with the sport.

As a proud sponsor of UWCL, Heineken aimed to change this by doing what we have been doing for 150 years: inviting people to refresh their perspectives.

With no place to watch the UWCL matches, it was time for Heineken to step onto the field and do what no other beer brand has done before.

Opportunity: fortunately a big chunk of Heineken’s media budget is directed to something that can help with this.

We're talking about a channel that not only has an 84% penetration rate but also a 102 affinity with our target.

Heineken presents Out of Home Matches - turning Heineken's media budget into visibility for the UEFA Women's Champions League.

We turned OOHs into giant TV screens to broadcast UWCL matches, to leverage Brazilians' behavior, changing their focus to what matters: women's football.

And to extend media flight power, Heineken took some extra steps: from partnering with DAZN to stream the UWCL for free to creating a unique trade program to encourage bars to also broadcast the matches.

For 150 years, Heineken has been inviting people to refresh their perspectives.

To refresh UWCL's viewership perspective, our starting point was a typical Brazilian behavior.

Cultural truth: in Brazil, football fans just can't resist peeking at a screen with a match on. Literally, any screen.

If there's football on, there will be a Brazilian watching.

Problem: when it comes to the UWCL, there simply isn't any screen for them to peek at.

Insight: What if Heineken placed these games where people pass by everyday so they could take a look at them?

And what if we did that not only in accessible channels with high visibility but also where Brazilians engage? OOH has an 84% penetration with a 102 affinity, being the second most penetrated channel among Heineken's target, just behind the internet.

We selected high-impact billboards in high-traffic areas to generate visibility for the UWCL matches. In addition to these areas, we also included spaces such as parks and shopping centers, where people are looking for leisure activities.

Our out-of-home media partners provide the technology for installation on their billboards to capture the signal and integrate it with the vehicle's operating system for live streaming the match via DAZN channel. For this, we reserved an average of 2 exclusive hours on each billboard for uninterrupted transmission, ensuring that anyone could look at the matches and go watch them at Heineken's partners bars.

We reached millions of people in priority markets of Brazil: São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte, Porto Alegre, Curitiba, and Florianópolis, as well as major capitals across the country: Salvador, Recife, Fortaleza, Brasília, Manaus, Goiânia, and Vitória.

By repurposing its media budget, Heineken changed the game for UWCL in Brazil.

The Out-Of-Home Match reached over 25 million people and garnered 47.2 million impressions. Everybody celebrated how we put UWCL on the spotlight, reaching $52M in Earned Media.

We established a new social occasion, showing that enjoying the UWCL with a Heineken is a perfect match. The score? DAZN received +35% traffic, +280 bars began streaming the championship after our trade program, increasing our sales by 72% during the matches.

But, there was also a game-changer result for women's football: major media outlets noticed the demand for their matches. For the first time in over 20 years, TNT, a TV channel that broadcasts the UCL, began airing the UWCL in Brazil.

Once again Heineken brought new perspectives to set trends in the category, increasing its differentiation by 15 percentage points and reinforcing its leadership in Kantar's attribute.

To help increase women's football visibility Heineken blended creativity, cultural relevance and social impact, creating a stunt that captured audience's interest in a unique and unexpected way.

Out-Of-Home Matches turned traditional OOH billboards into an outdoor live entertainment activation turning 3,500 OOHs into giant TV screens that broadcast UWCL gaming creating the perfect engaging storytelling and community involvement reaching over R$52million in earned media.