Episode 179 - Heineken Starring Bars Ad Reviewed by The Guardian and Monzo Bank
Heineken say they want to help bars out. But does the work described in Starring Bars, created by LePub Milan, LePub Singapore and Edelman, really make a difference?
On our latest episode, Joel Midgley (Head of Marketing at The Guardian) and David Brewerton (Growth Marketing Director at Monzo Bank) discuss the merits of adding purpose into Heineken’s advertising, and who really benefits from it.
Thanks to Contagious for choosing this ad for us. Have a look and see what you would rate it!
Episode 179 - Heineken Starring Bars Ad Reviewed by The Guardian and Monzo Bank
Transcript
This is automatically generated, so it’s not 100% accurate.
Tom Ollerton 0:00
Hello and welcome to Advertisers Watching Ads. This is a show where brands watch other brands’ ads.
Tom Ollerton 0:05
My name is Tom Ollerton. I'm the founder of Automated Creative, the creative effectiveness adtech platform. And this week we are going to look at an ad by Heineken and it's called Starring Bars. It's not really an ad as such, but it's got a relatively bold and recent campaign that turns real bars into film sets to support local venues and give them a bit of extra budget. But before we get to that ad, let's meet this week's guests.
Joel Midgley 1:42
Joel Midgley, Head of Marketing at The Guardian.
David Brewerton 2:04
I’m David Brewerton, Growth Marketing Director at Monzo.
Tom Ollerton 2:24
What a panel!
Tom Ollerton 2:31
So on a scale of 1 to 5... One, two, three...
David Brewerton 2:44
I’m gonna give it a two.
Tom Ollerton 2:45
So, as usual on the show, whenever I first see the ad, I get all excited about it and then throughout the show, it gets- We start to be less convinced, but do you think this is brilliant or were you like, I’m not so sure.
David Brewerton 2:57
Well to be honest, probably on the, not so sure part of the spectrum, to be honest with you. I'm surprised they don't film their own ads in Heineken bars already. The general campaign, in terms of going bigger, trying to get Hollywood directors interested in it. I felt like that was probably a little bit contrived. I didn't see anything around how that might have actually worked. It is an admirable message behind it to support these kind of community locations and the destinations that people go, go to as a community. But I didn't really see like how it was going to fundamentally make a difference to these bars. It felt like a bit of a one and done type effort rather than something that continually support the bars. Like how often are bars generally hired out for film sets etc.? Given the amount of bars and locations there are around the world or any specific locations, so yeah, I'd be more concerned about the actual impact that it might have on some of these bars.
Joel Midgley 1:23
They've got a reputation issue, given that they're selling via but their own bars and other bars versus also through retail. That's obviously what sort of dragging footfall away from bars is the sort of the price difference primarily. And they've got a PR issue that they need to solve. Any campaign that's purporting to be generous, I think you sort of want to approach with a sense of cynicism to actually find out to what degree is this effort actually self-serving, rather than trying to sort of provide the help that it says upfront. And then there's also this sort of thought around Heineken in, in any industry, but definitely within its own, is perceived as a massive player and a big spender. My cynical mind thought if I was the owner of a pub or a manager of a pub or bar or whatever that was struggling as a result of people flocking to discount in retail, would this actually look like it was kind of a flashy show from Heineken? Rather than necessarily something that was genuinely helping.
David Brewerton 4:44
It was their version of purpose, I guess, isn't it? It’s like trying to get something that's relevant to them. So I guess that's one tick in the box, because a lot of brands try to do purpose in a way that's completely irrelevant to them as a brand. But I think if your brand isn't built around the purpose and then you try and find one that even if it's relevant to the category or industry, that, the brand is operating within, it still feels a bit like a bit contrived, right? So this is something that I think is admirable that perhaps they should do.
Joel Midgley 5:11
It felt like it was a really good like production principle that as part of the ways of working within Heineken, we will always default to supporting businesses in this way. And we will commit to using X percent of our budget to kind of, to support them. That felt like as an in-house sort of backroom principle, felt like a really brilliant thing. I can definitely see the benefit in like telling people about that and making a virtue of it, because, you know, why not? But whether it sort of lives up quite to the, to the standards of how much it's actually helping these businesses on an ongoing basis versus is it a flash in the pan campaign, or is this like an ongoing commitment that would require, presumably a significant amount of investment?
Tom Ollerton 5:50
The thing that really strikes me, and I see a lot of these sizzle videos, obviously doing this show, is the quality of this video in particular. It's beautifully done. Why are they spending so much cash on it?
David Brewerton 6:06
You're right. There probably has been a significant amount of money spent on this, but it is great that, you know, making it easier, more accessible for directors and, you know, location scouts or whoever to find these type of destinations. But realistically, each individual bar that they've got listed on that website, how many bookings, how much income, how much support are they going to get from an initiative like this versus something that could be maybe smaller scale, maybe a bit less flashy, but genuinely supports these type of establishments and environments, like the heart of the community. They might spend a fair bit of money doing them up or some of them up, by the looks of it. But like on a more ongoing basis, how much income are they really going to get from an initiative like this? I'd be pretty skeptical. The idea to support in real life is great, but I think there's probably a more sustainable and better way perhaps, to do that, and this seems a bit more like a showpiece way to do that.
Tom Ollerton 6:50
So David, your point is it, like, it's great to have a purpose and even better, if your brand fits into it, but you feel this isn't showing enough value at the end. It's an idea. It's a bit of sizzle at the front, but you know, how are bars actually benefiting? How's it benefiting Heineken? How's it benefiting the bars?
Joel Midgley 7:06
The only metric like success metric that I could find was 300,000 ad views per bar location, which I'm not sure what exactly what that means, but it's very much like a sort of PR media metric rather than an impact, like a, like a social impact or campaign impact metric, which would, I think, be like, surely the real measure of success for something that's got this rather lofty ambition.
David Brewerton 7:30
My real view is brands should generally steer away from purpose. They do it too much unless your whole business is built around a specific purpose. So like Who Gives A Crap toilet paper or Tony’s Chocolonely, like perfect examples of brands with purpose, built with purpose. But you see so many again, similar chocolate companies that will say, you know, we do X, Y and Z. And this is, I think in reality, that's not how they operate then, they don’t live what they actually do. And this feels a little bit like in that area, that they try to make it as relevant as they can about, you know, the pubs and bars that they support. But I just question how much real value, how much is really being given back to these locations. It feels like more beneficial to Heineken than an actual purpose on top of what they do as a business.
Tom Ollerton 8:11
So I wonder, is it? Yeah. Is this really a problem? No. Is this a solution to that pretend problem? Maybe. And who wins? Probably no one.
David Brewerton 8:20
Yeah. Location scouts, maybe. Making their job easier.
Joel Midgley 8:22
It did make me think about like what is, what is more of a gold standard in this area that I'd want to aspire to if I was planning this kind of activity because this world is very different, this is like a sort of B2B activity, isn’t it really? Which is far away from where my head is usually at in my day job. And there's been a couple of kind of more, maybe more emotionally led, slightly more humorous B2B campaigns from Figma and Canva. I don’t know if you've seen in the last few months. There was a Canva campaign that ran, they did a takeover around Waterloo station over the last like spring, summer, where they brought to life a lot of the tools that Canva has. They brought them to life across out-of-home placements in a really creative way. So they essentially, sort of completely disrupted each of the placements to demonstrate what goes wrong when you get design wrong, which was brave, interesting. And there was a Figma ad that was more was a genuinely funny piece of content about the problems of designing and the solutions that Figma can provide. So they felt like, you know, kind of exploring that lighter tone of voice in the B2B space.
Tom Ollerton 9:25
So would you sign this campaign? Not the video. Would you sign off the whole campaign in its current guise? One, two, three...
Joel Midgley 9:33
No.
Tom Ollerton 9:34
Well, there you have it. Lovely video! Heineken, there's the feedback from the industry.
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