This is an activation event, that took place at 2 festivals in Romania, called “Change the city with creativity”. Besides lots of music performances, the festival is a stage to share ideas on how improving the city and to connect people to make ideas happen. A party with a purpose.

Grolsch Popnetics is software that is able to recognize the unique sound of a ‘pop’ of the Grolsch swingtop. ‘Fake pops’ won’t work! Once it has captured a ‘pop’ it triggers an action. At the festivals, it triggered a custom-built paint cannon to fire paint at a huge stenciled wall. By ‘popping’ festival go-ers contributed in the co-creation of a unique mural, revealed at the end of the festival.

It showed the audience they can help improve their city, it provided an engaging Grolsch brand experience … and it drove the sale of Grolsch swingtops at the festivals.

Grolsch is repositioning their global brand. It aims to be the social glue that helps bring people together to inspire creativity. This role can’t be claimed without proving it. So Grolsch’ strategy centers around creating physical brand experiences.

Grolsch challenged us to develop an activation at the festival around the on-premise sales of their iconic swingtops, that contributed to the festival theme; “Change the city with creativity.”

Improving a city can only be accomplished when residents work together. We inspired people to think about their own contribution, by making it very easy for them to start changing their city together.

As mentioned, we gave the audience an experience they wanted to be a part of. A unique, physical and impactful brand experience right at the moment of consumption. Around 700 visitors joined in the co-creation of the artworks (near maximum capacity) and many more were spectators for a prolonged period of time. The artworks shared on Facebook were viewed 50.000 times and the free-publicity about the project reached over 750.000 Romanians.

We gave the audience an experience they wanted to be a part of. The product was the key to participate. And the brand inspired the audience to think about their contribution in improving the city … together.

It took us around 6 months to successfully prototype the Popnetics software. The biggest challenge was to get the software to perform in an uncontrolled environment, such as a festival. That wasn't easy, but we pulled it off. (BTW, the software will be used for different Grolsch brand activations around the globe)

The development of the custom-built paint cannon was another challenge. It took lots of testing to find the right combination of balloon strength, firing velocity and paint composition, to get the balloons to explode just right. And then the warm weather at the festival required us to adjust on site.

It ran perfectly at the 2 two-day festivals in September 2014.