Well what can I say other than our green friends have done it yet again. Myself, Ross and Dave were lucky to be at the latest Heineken Green Spheres gig. It was held in the beautiful town of Kilkenny and was quite simply amazing. From the get-go the town was a buzz with excitement and energy. The venue looked fantastic, it seeped cool out of every pore. It was decked out in such a way with lights and installations that it looked like a VIP party wherever you were standing.
Everyone in the place themselves felt like VIPs with free Heineken being handed out by cool looking army girls. The music was banging. There wasn’t one person standing still in the whole place, everyone was moving to the beats, even when the music stopped due to a blown speaker, the crowd kept going with a chorus of Olé, Olé, Olé.
All in all, it was a night of music, booze, dancing and good times that left us all feeling green (in a very good way!).
This year, The Heineken Cup Final and the Champions League Final are happening on the same Saturday (22nd May). Given Heineken are major sponsors of both events they wisely seized the opportunity to create a monumental day in the pub for Irish sports fans. Pubs across the country were taking part and they already had the name: ‘Heineken Star Saturday’. All they needed was an idea to bring it all together. We took the idea that two great sports were coming together as our starting point. From there we were able to work together with all of Heineken’s agencies to develop a consistent theme from online to ontrade and from outdoor to radio. The photographer was Kevin Griffin and the retouching was done by Midas in London.
Here are the remaining three TV commercials in the Heineken Cup series. As you can see ‘the skip pass’ is a variation of ‘the intercept’. I particularly like his weak celebration at the end.
‘The scrum’ celebrates that moment of success that all smallish people like myself experience when successfully retrieving a pint from a packed bar.
Finally ‘the knock on’ - it looks simple - but this took four hours to shoot. You’d be surprised how beer refuses to spill the way you want it to! We got there in the end. I hope you like them. To see the previous two commercials, click here.
Every art director loves to have a go at liquidy shots from time to time. Every art director also loves beer. With our Heineken posters the planets aligned with liquidy beery goodness.
Shot by Ray Massey and retouched by Taylor James these posters remind us that beer, apart from being tasty, is also very very beautiful.
Check out our new Heineken spot ‘Gigolo’ which was filmed in Argentina. As the agency producer I get to see lots of scripts. Not all of them get made. When I read the script initially, I loved the description of the improvised rooftop bar where a bunch of friends are hanging out - I thought I could literally see myself there.
It’s the second spot in a campaign we produced featuring the bottle as our main character. I loved this notion from the beginning. It’s kinda cool seeing what you’ve worked on for months and months come to life at last. So much time was spent researching soundtracks and negotiating with music companies for rights, it was a relief when everything was finally signed off and we got to go shoot the scripts.
At the time we filmed the spot, it was so important to get the sync right with the lyrics, so that the timing was perfect throughout. This meant listening to that track over and over on set during filming. It’s a great track, well… for the first 1,000 listens anyway!
This week sees the release of our new Heineken Music work. As part of the ongoing “Live every last drop” campaign, it once again focuses on the interesting life of a Heineken Bottle, but this time in a musical context.
As advertisers, it’s nice to learn that people are actually paying attention to your ads. Although, this clip from Ray D’Arcy’s show may be a case of people having a little too much time to examine our latest Heineken ad!
We received a request from D’Arcy’s production team to settle a dispute between a husband and wife who were debating the ‘logic’ of the sequence of events in our ‘One Green Bottle’ ad. Listen to our response, which was read out on the show last Thursday.
Working with Heineken Ireland over the past 7 years has given us at McCann plenty of opportunities to create some of the best ideas and campaigns in Ireland. So it’s no wonder that we’re delighted to launch our biggest ever campaign for the iconic Heineken Bottle.
The brief – how do we get men to engage with the Heineken Bottle and take on a category that has seen speciality bottled beers gain in popularity. Rather than look to solely create an ad campaign, everyone aimed for a big idea: a fresh new philosophy for the brand, one that consumers could share and identify with.
“Live Every Last Drop” is the big idea that captures this new brand philosophy where stories are told through the eyes of the Heineken Bottle.
First up is the “One Green Bottle” TV commercial. It’s often said that your life flashes before your eyes if you are unfortunate to be visited by a near-death experience. This is the basic idea behind our first TV commercial, where we see the flashback of the life of a Heineken Bottle as it falls to a seemingly certain end.
Stories told through the eyes of Heineken bottles that Live Every Last Drop is a big idea that can stretch across any touchpoint and “One Green Bottle” is only the start of a big idea that will run and run.
The return of the Heineken Cup gives us another chance to look at our recent Heineken Cup spot “Field of Dreams”.
Set in the year 2028, it follows a documentary crew to a disused stadium to interview the old groundskeeper. While he reminisces about the great games he’s seen on this sacred turf, the crew are disturbed to see that ghostly presences still play out great moments from matches, proving that “Greatness Lives On”.
Shot over one very cold and very long night in the east end of London by Knucklehead’s directorial duo Zak & Dan, a massive amount of effort went into the Art Direction of the Stadium. Huge sections of the stands were carefully dressed providing a believable disused stadium that has fallen into disrepair, while the pitch was covered in overgrown sections of turf cut from a local piece of land. To create a sense of realism around the action, the players were captured on a hand cranked camera so that the film could be double exposed to create the ghostly effect, while the post production was handled in Framestore, London. Finally the performance by veteran actor John Nolan provided brought a sense of warmth and nostalgia to the ad.
Well what can I say other than our green friends have done it yet again. Myself, Ross and Dave were lucky to be at the latest Heineken Green Spheres gig. It was held in the beautiful town of Kilkenny and was quite simply amazing. From the get-go the town was a buzz with excitement and energy. The venue looked fantastic, it seeped cool out of every pore. It was decked out in such a way with lights and installations that it looked like a VIP party wherever you were standing.
