Heineken Silver: Launching a Metaverse Beer IRL
Cow
Client: Heineken UK
But how does the world’s most famous name in brewing launch a beer at a time where socialising is increasingly done on social media and where we are being sold the ‘infinite possibilities’ of virtual worlds such as the Metaverse? When a rival beer brand opened the world’s first virtual bar, the much heralded ‘infinite possibilities’ of the Metaverse were exposed. For people sitting home alone wearing a headset, it’s a sparsely populated bar where you can buy a beer that you can’t drink? That’s just a bit…lame. Some things definitely are better in the real world, such as meeting friends for a beer. And, in a world becoming obsessed with the virtual world, that was the impulse for launching Heineken Silver to Gen Zs and millennials IRL. Teased with a media launch of world's first digital beer in the Metaverse, the Cow team then created the first IRL Meta Bar (a pixelated bar, complete with Actual Reality headsets and chunky plastic pints) before entering a portal into Silverland. Here 400 media, influencers and young adults partied with real food, real people and real beer. The integrated launch also resulted in 75 earned media features including BBC News, City AM, Tyla, GQ, The Sun, Daily Mirror and The Verge.