All I Want For Christmas Is Heineken
The Challenge
Christmas campaigns are tough, simply because it’s traditional and predictable. But you’ll need a big dose of imagination to beat the competition. Every brand wants to achieve top-of-mind and be the perfect gift for the season.
For beer brands, the holy grail is to increase the number of drinkers, especially occasional drinkers during Christmas, to increase overall customer penetration. It seemed like beer has gone out of fashion. But really, everyone deserves a beer come Christmas.
Heineken wanted to subvert the cliché of Christmas gifting and turn on a surprise – for all.
The Insight
Let’s be honest, we all give and get a fair amount of cliché, if not cringeworthy, ‘gifts’ during Christmas: A mug, Christmas sweater, hand cream, or even Old Spice (‘Really, do I smell?’). If only we could trade them for some ice-cold, thirst-quenching beer!
A simple choice architecture for every full-bellied male: Would you rather some cringeworthy presents or some cool beer for Christmas?
Heineken decided to subvert this season’s gifting.
The Execution
“All I want for Christmas is Heineken!”
Way beyond a Del Toro global TVC (yes, we stole the line – it is a good line; Ok we didn’t have a choice), we made Gifting core to our campaign – in fact, we elevated and innovated it!
Gifting would bring us both creative and commercial success.
We created the Heineken Christmas ‘Gift-o-rater’ online portal, which suggests you exchange cringeworthy Christmas gifts for something more worthwhile – a Heineken! – and even lets you trade-in useless presents for some Heineken, after Christmas!
The ‘Gift-o-rater’ lets users check the ‘cringe-worth’ of their gifts – all tongue-in-cheek, of course – and suggests the number of Heineken to give instead.
And for the first time ever, Heineken offered online sales ordering – so you can now order them.
It also went nation-wide with playable kiosks, Clear Channel PlayLive! – from Orchard Road to Serangoon Central, and even post-Christmas at Lau Pa Sat, where we brought the ‘Gift-o-rater’ to life at ‘The Heineken Happy Returns’, inviting people to exchange their gifts (on Boxing Day, no less) for Heineken on the spot. Talk about stretching the campaign asset!
The Results
The gift-o-rater website engaged 73,240 visitors. And over 13 million media impressions across platforms with, over 268,621 interactions (play counts) registered. Their online sales did extremely well with Heineken giving out 400 coolerboxes – which at $150 per order, greatly boosted sales.