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.

Peru is one the countries in Latin America with the largest number of digital 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.

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.

The innovation that Pixeless brings – not only in the environmental context of Peru, but in the environmental and energy crisis that the world is experiencing – could drastically reduce the global energy consumption on a daily basis, if its use were to be applied to all brands and all digital billboards, generating a positive impact in the climate change context we are living in.

*http://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 a digital billboard, but they can notice it in the environment.

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.

Like a pointillist painting, a digital billboard is also made up of small dots or... pixels., 2,073,600 pixels. 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 with 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.

In this way, only by blacking out pixels, we achieve energy savings of approximately 35%. -25% for moderate light, and -22% for darker pieces.

- 35% REDUCTION IN 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 Pixeless' innovation were adopted by other advertisers, global energy consumption would be drastically reduced” Daniela Franza, Corporate & Legal Affairs.