Heineken's Soccer Swindle

This week for class we were asked to do a presentation on the use of social network sites in public relations campaigns. For my part of the presentation, I chose Heineken’s Amazing Soccer Swindle and Marmite’s Election Campaign. I am going to split this into two blogs because these brands have used social media in different ways and cover different issues. For my first blog on the things I discovered while doing this presentation I will tackle Heineken.

Heineken are sponsors of UEFA Champions League and as part of the public relations surrounding this sponsorship they ran a guerrilla campaign which involved duping over 1000 AC Milan fans to go to a classical concert on the same night as the important game with Real Madrid on the 21st of October. Here is how they did it:



The results were published in a case study by Mashable.com (The Social Media Guide). 1,100 soccer fans got swindled while 1.5 million people saw their reactions on live on Sky Sports TV, and Heineken received five million visitors to the site devoted to the event. On top of this they received a great deal of news coverage for their troubles. While on the social network site YouTube there are currently over 450,000 hits.

This kind of viral video can be an extremely effective way of getting a brand’s message out. There are countless 'Top 20' lists of the best viral videos available on the internet, including one by Mashable. The popularity of conversations which begin 'Have you seen that video on YouTube?' are what public relations campaign should be aiming for. However, there are limitations to this method of utilising social network sites, for example, the video has to have some kind of interest or humour in it in order to ‘go viral’. But it also seems to need something else, a bit of j'ai ne sais quoi or x-factor, to make it popular enough to make an impact upon the vast quantities of such videos available on the internet. This makes it a bit of an elusive concept for public relations practitioners to chase. But surely that doesn't mean you can't try?

Getting the right video may be one thing but you also have problems once it is out 'there'. There is little control over what happens to it and as many times as there is positive feedback as there is negative. As Steve Chinn pointed out in a lecture given at Stirling University on the 31st of March, it is difficult to define whether viral videos are advertising or not. Personally, I think they fit nicely into the public relations niche as they fall into the task of ‘building relationships’ with all the dangers word-of-mouth networking brings.