“We’ve seen consistently that AV delivers,” Zach Jordan told the audience at the recent Campaign TV Summit. “That’s why it’s so important that we use a blended approach and get our campaigns in front of everyone who needs to see them.”
Jordan is head of media strategy & planning at Heineken UK, and spoke at Campaign's recent TV Advertising Summit alongside Polly Browne, Google’s head of video and display sales for retail.
To be fair, the duo did have a secret weapon. The campaign they were using as a case study was Heineken’s sponsorship of the UEFA EURO 2020 football tournament. The tournament had been delayed due to the pandemic, which only added to the anticipation of the nation’s football fans. And after a highly engaging run of games, England made it to the final at Wembley where they faced Italy.
Heineken’s sponsorship of the tournament was also a roaring success. To get fans excited, the brand developed a good-natured but tongue-in-cheek campaign named ‘Enjoy the rivalry’. Campaign videos, culminating in a hero spot named ‘Finally Together’, showed fans from rival teams being overly nice to each other, only for it to emerge that this was the set-up for a good-natured prank.
Throughout the campaign, videos clocked up almost 16m views and Heineken finished the tournament as the #1 ranked beer brand for sponsorship awareness. No mean feat in such a crowded market.
Jordan said a large part of the campaign’s success was down to his team’s blended approach across linear TV and video-on-demand (VoD), including YouTube. To get the best possible return on its budget, the brand mixed premium TV slots with a range of high-reach, high-impact VoD placements.
Heineken worked with its partners to develop new and innovative ways to define and measure success. Aligning content to context, it delivered media to fans at exactly the right time and in the right setting to maximise engagement.
A key advantage of VoD, explained Jordan, was its ability to target media by both contextual and demographic factors. “A 18-year-old fan wants to watch media in a very different way to a 44-year-old,” explained Jordan. VoD allowed the brand to hit each demographic and let Heineken connect with their target audience.
This meant it could serve campaign content at scale, while also giving specific demographics creative most likely to move them to take the desired action. This was particularly important, given the unpredictability of the context — the twists and turns of something as dynamic and hard to predict as a football tournament.
“Other than that, try to innovate and push boundaries. There are lots of interesting things you can do around measurement, to test and learn at scale. As much as you can, move away from a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to creative. And finally, make sure you really understand the consumer. Where are they consuming their media? What interests them? What are they talking about? Make sure you’re shaping your AV plan to fit those things.”
