Heineken counted down to reopening on 3,000 screens that named your nearest café

How do you show unique, user-generated content across 3,000+ DOOH displays in the Netherlands — on every screen, at every moment — efficiently, and drive traffic to Heineken's hospitality partners at reopening?

Screens around 555 venues were bought automatically from a point-of-interest list via Sage+Archer. HTML5 creatives auto-fit 3,000+ displays across 100+ resolutions and rendered each screen from live feeds: a countdown to reopening, the nearest café's name from GPS data, then photos tagged #heteerstebiertje.

Won the AMMA Award for best media innovation (May 2022); ran for two weeks across 12 Dutch cities driving traffic to 555 Heineken venues — a data-driven DOOH setup the article calls a first.

When the Netherlands announced the reopening of hospitality after the COVID lockdown, Heineken built its campaign around the moment everyone was waiting for: #heteerstebiertje, the first poured beer. The question, as the trade press framed it, was how to show unique, user-generated content across more than 3,000 DOOH displays nationwide — on every screen and at every moment — efficiently, while driving traffic to Heineken's café partners.

The answer was to import the data-and-technology toolkit of online advertising into the centuries-old out-of-home channel. Dentsu International/Posterscope bought the DOOH space around hospitality partners automatically through the Sage+Archer platform, uploading a point-of-interest list of partner addresses so displays within the desired radius could be bought in one click. HTML5 technology made each creative responsive to 3,000+ screens with over 100 different resolutions, and each display rendered unique content from a datafeed.

The campaign ran for two weeks in three hyperlocal phases: dynamic creatives counting down to the reopening; executions that automatically showed the Heineken café next to the display, matched from the POI list and the screen's GPS data in the bid request; and finally a real-time feed of consumer photos from #heteerstebiertje, with café name and profile, so passers-by saw the right photo at the right panel near the right partner. Heineken ran the reopening campaign for 555 hospitality partners across 12 Dutch cities, and in May 2022 it won the AMMA Award for the most innovative media use.

The reopening moment was national, but the purchase decision was hyperlocal — one beer, at the café around the corner.

Putting partner cafés' names and their customers' photos on the screens made the venues the hero, which is what secured their participation.

Programmatic buying from a POI list made 3,000+ individually localized executions affordable — the efficiency was the innovation.

Online-ad machinery — POI targeting, data feeds, dynamic creative — imported into out-of-home turns thousands of billboards into thousands of local invitations.

As of 2022-05-24 the campaign had won the AMMA Award for best media innovation, a week after being named; it had run for two weeks across 12 Dutch cities for 555 hospitality partners.