Heineken® believes that when people take the time for open conversations, they break down barriers and can focus on what unites them, not what divides them. Heineken® continues to uphold its commitment to bring people together through its Open Your World campaign, which taps into specific cultural and social stereotypes to spark conversation between people with different views and opinions.

The new ‘Generations Apart’ film uses parents’ traditional career expectations of their children as a foundation for the social experiment and a platform to address wider communication barriers. The film uses the story of the up-and-coming comedian Rudy Singh and his father to encourage people to break down their own communication barrier – because some things are best discussed over a Heineken®.

The film captures the real reactions of a live audience, who were unknowingly part of the social experiment, and the true headline act. After hearing the story of Rudy Singh and his father, the audience was inspired to bridge their own communication and conversation gap and open their minds.

The challenge in the execution was that being a live scenario, it could have gone either way. The worse would have been if the audience was a bit indifferent to the events taking place before them. But then, at some level the audience connected with the stand-up act and empathised with Rudy Singh and his choices. It could also be because lot of Indian youngsters would have had a similar experience growing up, where they had to adhere to the strict guidelines laid by parents when it came to higher education, career planning, choice of spouse among others.

This was a purely ‘digital-first’ campaign.

Our activity reached 18.6 million of the 70 million 25+ Facebookers in India.

The reach being 16.5 Million and a healthy engagement rate of more than 52,000. Facebook engagement was accessible only to people above 25 years, the legal drinking age in India.

Received 44k likes and 7.7k shares.

The fact that it had 96% positive sentiment is a good indicator that it hit the right buttons. And the brand was able to do this without being preachy or boring. Since the topic resonated with the TG, it led to many positive comments, some even being reminded about their own life choices.

The sales were encouraging enough that Heineken got launched in 2 more states in India post the campaign. The sales data for Q3 are being compiled and are not currently available.