Heineken

From a single brewery in Amsterdam almost 150 years ago, Heineken has grown into the world’s most valuable international premium beer brand.Over the past few decades, Heineken USA has established themselves as a leader in music sponsorship – partnering with many of the biggest festivalsand venues across the country.

We had just 7 weeks to create a fan experience unlike anything Heineken has ever done. Our mission was to amplify Heineken’s involvement at the Ultra Music Festival by bolstering their online and on-site presence, and we decided Instagram was the perfect tool. Instagram gave fans a chance to compete against other festival-goers while leveraging Heineken’s sponsorship of this influencer-filled festival. Fans contended for an exclusive prize which required consistent engagement throughout the weekend. We ultimately created a responsive website for mobile, desktop, and tablet, a custom scoring platform, and loop for the 20’x15’ video wall and Heineken house entrance.

Our goal was to evoke fan participation in both the digital and physical environments. We started by creating a simple 3 step user process, and bridged the gap between submission and results with a custom, straightforward judging platform. With so much action happening all around the festival, we knew the results and other information in the video loop needed to be concise and easy to comprehend, in addition to looking awesome. Metajive centered the experience around providing continuous updates of the leaderboard online, in the ultra premium heineken house and on the festival’s jumbotron.

Understanding we would be competing for attention among the bright lights and loud beats, our intuitive approach highlighted the strong Heineken brand and channelled the energy of Ultra Music Festival through all elements. Our use of light, motion, and “freshness” effectively brought the user from the crowd at Ultra into the virtual Heineken world, whether user was on-site or the contest driven website.

The process was designed to flow from the user submission to the leaderboard in the shortest amount of time possible. With specific templates optimized for desktop, mobile, and tablet, as well as a 16x20’ onsite video loop, the user stayed constantly engaged with real-time results while the judges kept the entries flowing through the streamlined scoring and validation system.

By creating a consistent look and channeling it through Heineken’s strong digital and physical presence, we were able to create something interesting and rewarding for festival-goers and online watchers. While drawing attention on-site to the Heineken sponsorship and the Heineken House at Ultra we simultaneously created millions of positive impressions online through Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and the support websites. It’s always a blast working with Wieden + Kennedy, but this one was ultra fun.