Heineken’s “Open Your World” campaign is a real life social experiment that puts total strangers, divided by their polarizing beliefs, together for the first time. What happens when you bring together a feminist and an antifeminist? Or a climate change activist with a vehement climate change denier? For more than 150 years Heineken has stood for openness, believing that the simple act of sitting down and having a conversation over a beer, helps bring people together.

Heineken’s motto of “Open Your World” was not widely understood. The campaign was designed to communicate Heineken’s belief in the value of openness in society, and to put that into the context of the bitterly divided times we currently find ourselves in. Believing that the simple act of sitting down and having a conversation over a beer, helps bring people together and can lead to resolving conflict, the idea was to stage a social experiment whereby we attempt to engineer that very thing.

So as not to undermine the message, the idea was unscripted and filmed under strict documentary conditions. The director consulted conflict resolution specialist Dr. Govinda Clayton, before creating an experiment that would challenge two strangers with polarising views to discuss their differences, and hopefully find some mutual understanding. The production company needed to cast real people with violently opposing viewpoints, each person cast could not know why they had been cast or anything about the experiment.