Heineken painted a fan's taunt to La Rochelle's coach where landing planes could read it

Heineken runs its Love Rivalry platform on the belief that the bigger the rugby rivalry, the better the game. Fans were invited to send cheeky voice messages to the opposing team on match day, and one of them could be made real.

Publicis Dublin helped superfan Colin Fennessy paint his message to La Rochelle head coach Ronan O'Gara at Ballyboughal Airfield next to Dublin airport, in eco-friendly paint, sized 15m x 10m so it sat on the flight path of planes coming into Dublin for final weekend.

The material reports no measured results. The message was designed to be the first thing rugby fans saw on approach into Dublin, putting Heineken's Love Rivalry platform literally in the rival camp's line of sight.

Heineken billed the 2023 Heineken Champions Cup final as the purest form of its premise: the bigger the rivalry, the better the rugby. Leinster, chasing a fifth cup, faced reigning champions Stade Rochelais at Dublin's Aviva Stadium on 20 May 2023 — a rematch of the final Leinster had lost the year before.

As part of the Love Rivalry campaign, Heineken Ireland invited fans to send cheeky voice messages to the opposing team on match day. The brand picked Leinster superfan Colin Fennessy's note to La Rochelle head coach Ronan O'Gara — 'ROG' to locals — and made it physical: 'Never too late to turn the plane around, ROG!'

With agency Publicis Dublin, the message was painted at Ballyboughal Airfield right beside Dublin airport, measuring 15m x 10m in eco-friendly paint. Sized and sited to be legible from 30,000 feet, it greeted every plane on the La Rochelle flight path into Dublin in the days before the final.

The placement is the punchline: the message sits on the opposing team's own flight path into the final's host city.

Fan-generated content gets scaled up — a voice note from the campaign call-in becomes a landmark-sized artwork.

Eco-friendly paint answers the obvious objection to painting a giant message on a field next to an airport.

A sponsorship platform turns physical when a fan's own words become the ad — and the placement does the joke's work, because the rival coach cannot miss it on his way in.

The final was played on 20 May 2023 at Aviva Stadium between Leinster and Stade Rochelais. The material records nothing further about the message or the match result.