Heineken recently announced a huge gear change in its alcohol marketing by entering into ‘the largest ever single sponsorship deal involving a non-alcoholic beer brand’, replacing Amstel as a Uefa Europa League sponsor. 

Heineken has been a Uefa partner in one way or another since 1994. Now, it’s putting down around €10m ($11.7m) a year to associate its non-alcoholic Heinkenen 0.0 alternative with European football, according to SportBusiness. The goal is to target the ‘Can’t-ers’ and ‘Don’t Want-ers’, parents, professionals and active people who can’t, or don’t want, to get drunk, but still enjoy the taste of beer.

But the campaign is being driven by insight around the new state of broadcast football.

With the closure of stadiums, broadcasters haven’t been shy about putting more matches on TV – there’s no risk of it cannibalising live ticket sales, after all. Every day now hosts some footballing occasion. It isn’t hugely responsible or productive to encourage beer consumption on each of these days, especially considering the pandemic and impending recession bubbling away in the background.

With a measured decline in mainstream beer sales before the pandemic, one of the growth areas was non-alcoholic alternatives, as well as craft beers and seltzers. With this new sponsorship, Heineken will look to “unlock key non-alcoholic drinking occasions around sport”.

Heineken’s return is accompanied by a new TVC campaign entitled ’The Wait’ directed by Jack Cole. It’s early days yet, but marketers expect to see a performance spike. “With regards for performance of sponsorship properties, it will be interesting to see if there’s a spike in interest due to football’s return and the fact the competition will be finished off in a higher intensity mini-tournament format in Germany.”

The Europa League returned last week. Underlining the new digital-first strategy was a live-streamed gig from Defected Studios. With such a radical shift in the sponsorship strategy, we can continue to expect more fresh ideas from Heineken going forward.

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