Heineken wanted to revitalize its premium position amongst the nightclub audience. During the Milan Design Fair, we launched Heineken Ignite, the world’s first interactive beer bottle.

Heineken has 20 million contact moments with its customers every day. It's the moment where they pick up a bottle to drink a Heineken. It's a social moment that lends itself perfectly to social and mobile technology concepts.

So we took the notion of social and mobile and applied it directly to the product itself. We enhanced the Heineken bottle by adding a layer of technology and transformed it into an interactive experience which responded to social interaction such as ‘cheersing’, personal behavior such as drinking, and interaction with the environment by syncing the bottle to the music and the venue (lighting and screens). This made the experience immediate, intuitive and playful for the target audience: the sophisticated club visitor. The bottle uses micro sensors to detect motion or collisions and trigger different lighting effects which illuminate the product. DJ/VJ software also allows the bottles to be remotely activated to synchronize them to the music beat. Each bottle is part of an ad-hoc wireless network.

People instantly loved the Ignite bottles. No one needed an explanation, people immediately started playing with it, talking about it, interacting with their own and other people’s bottles and using the bottles to enhance their club night.

Heineken Ignite is a prototype launch and not a stunt, the film of the prototype launch (shot and edited the same night) was not promoted to public. The Tumblr blog with the production story for selected press was password protected, but received 3.500+ visitors and the videos on YouTube a collective count of 200,000 within a few days. The story went global and Heineken Ignite was featured on 300+ blogs including mainstream titles like CNBC, Engadget and Huffington post.

The launch in Milan was a huge success and provided Heineken with learnings on how the prototype would perform in a real life environment amongst an audience with high standards. The concept is being optimized based on these learnings and based on the success of the prototype launch, Heineken are now rolling it out in nightclubs in 7 of their top 25 markets before the end of the year.