We live in a world increasingly concerned about the climate crisis where brands say a lot and do little. Heineken, through Pixeless, proposes a real solution that helps to drastically reduce energy consumption in a very simple way. So simple that this innovation is imperceptible to the human eye, but really significant to reduce power consumption. This innovation, using the same resources and formats as always, achieves savings of approximately 35% of electricity consumption.

In Peru, electricity production increased by up to 186 %* in the last 20 years. Although the local demand for energy is covered almost in its entirety, and there are export and investment opportunities, the true focus must be to avoid the damage of environmental impact in each production process.

Lima is the Latin American city with the largest number of digital public billboards, this generates high demands of energy consumption. Heineken, being one of the main advertisers in the country, had a responsibility to do something about it to reduce its impact on the planet, contribute to reducing climate change and help this cause.

*https://www.osinergmin.gob.pe/seccion/centro_documental/Institucional/Estudios_Economicos/Libros/Osinergmin-Industria-Electricidad-Peru-25anios.pdf

Inspired by pointillism and the need to reduce the consumption of screen energy, PIXELESS is born. The idea consists in creating a mesh of dark pixels that goes over our videos, reducing the need of bright pixels by having some of them stay dark. By using this, we are saving approximately 35% of the energy in all our advertising across digital billboards, with an innovation that no one can notice on the screen, but they can notice it in the environment.

For the past 157 years, Heineken has been working to make a positive impact in the world. In April 2021 the company announced the "Brew a Better World" strategy, to drive progress towards a net zero, fairer and more balanced world by 2030. Its commitments are raising the bar on climate action and accelerating efforts to support the social agenda.

Heineken's objective, true to its strategy, is to generate the least impact throughout its value chain: Agriculture, packaging, distribution, communication and cooling represent 90% of the emissions outside their breweries.

But as one of the world's leading brewers, its footprint on the planet was on full display.

That is why they needed to work closely with suppliers and partners to find solutions together, committed to protecting the environment.

This is how Pixeless was born, the first advertising on digital billboards to reduce its energy consumption by 30%.

Like a pointillist painting, a digital billboard is also made up of small dots or pixels, 2,073,600 pixels more precisely. At the distance at which we see them, we would never notice that a third of those pixels are off. We would have approximately 691,200 pixels that do not need to be illuminated, and therefore do not consume energy.

We created a simple PNG, a pattern of black dots that is applied as a mesh in the videos to be projected in the digital billboards, which prevents the lighting of pixel patterns with effects that are invisible to the eye. This PNG was adapted to all digital billboard measures and applied to all video ads across our entire beer portfolio, and then delivered to all billboard providers.

This way, only by blacking out pixels, we achieve energy savings of up to approximately 35%.

35% LESS ENERGY CONSUMPTION

691.200 PIXELES OFF

5 CITIES ACROSS PERÚ

5 BRANDS OF THE HEINEKEN PORTFOLIO

OPEN SOURCE IDEA We invited all announcers that are interested in doing the same by making free templates available online in different digital billboard sizes and formats.

"If its use were to spread, the electricity consumption of the world's digital billboards would be drastically reduced."

Building on the past 10 years of Brew a Better World, Heineken is raising the bar on its support for the SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals) established by the UN as it looks ahead to a decade in which more ambitious collective action is the only way forward.

With this in mind, and together with The Sustainability and Responsibility Committee at Heineken Perú, we looked for a way to reduce the environmental impact in the company's value chain, and being the main billboard advertisers in the country, we found inspiration in the ad format itself.