Heineken: The World's Most Shared Moments

The Champions League is the most viewed annual sporting event on Earth. Over a 9-month period, around one billion people tune in. As an official sponsor of the tournament since 2005, Heineken has a history of encouraging fans to get together on match night and enjoy the football with a beer in hand. But new research showed Champions League viewers were only watching an average of four matches per season. To grow penetration, we needed to create more occasions for Heineken by getting football fans to watch more matches together. By talking to fans, we learned many were choosing to skip early group stages altogether. Under the impression that the best football only came towards the end of the tournament, they were saving themselves for the later stages. Our job was to prove them wrong by finding a new way of showcasing the dramatic storylines playing out in every match. The Idea: We transformed the collective voice of fans from around the world into real-time highlights, creating ‘The World’s Most Shared Moments’. This was a new kind of football punditry built from global fan behaviour and social media expression collected around the world in sync with events across the game. We celebrated the real moments that mattered to football fans around the world - not just the red cards and familiar incidents big broadcasters show, but the hilarious celebrations, the savage skills leaving players for dead and an unforgettable feline pitch invasion. By tracking conversation spikes, trending emojis/hashtags and conversation locations sync’d to the game timeline, we identified the highlight moments, with a clear sense of the emotional context of each element. Armed with this information, we edited 15” films together to showcase those moments and shared them with the world through mobile-first social formats such as Instagram Story Canvas and Carousel. These were adapted and localised for 60 Countries in 23 languages within hours of the final whistle. The clips were released to be hyper-relevant in a number of markets, each one gleaned from real fan activity, monitored on social media over the course of the game. By selecting and editing highlights from observed activity and responses, we guaranteed engagement and in doing so created a new form of football punditry, all the time reinforcing Heineken’s positive association with the Champion’s League to global fans. The campaign ran every week for the whole tournament, ensuring every game and every team were represented, bringing every fan along with Heineken along the journey.