Heineken / Ignite

Innovating the world’s first interactive beer bottle.

Pouring rights at the Milan Design Week were table-stakes for a global brand such as Heineken, so this brief was to give the product itself a more active role - turning it from a background player into a true VIP.

The team, however, was working with an extremely tight (3-month) turnaround from concept to party, so working with lead agency partners, Tribal DDB Amsterdam, Contagious’ consultancy division designed a sprint process to generate groundbreaking ideas, fast.

Working across a three-day period in Amsterdam, Heineken, Tribal and Contagious welcomed additional production partners to a dedicated space where title (and hierarchy!) was left at the door. Using a combination of best practice benchmarking, trend briefings, creative ideation and prototyping, the team used SCRUM methodology to generate over 30 concepts in less than 72hrs. 

Working from the insight that elaborate experiential ideas can often distract from the product, the team settled on a simple (yet technologically sophisticated) idea that didn’t distract from the consumption occasion, but rather enhanced and evolved it. The result was a bottle of Heineken that interacted not just with its surroundings but with the user themselves.

A key condition, however, was that this couldn’t involve the fabrication of a new bottle and in doing so, affect the scaling (and future application) of the concept. Instead, an accelerometer and accompanying LEDs were mounted to an Arduino board - roughly the size of a 2 Euro coin - and housed in a 3D-printed unit attached to the base of a standard bottle. 

Capable of detecting movement and vibration, the bottle would ‘ignite’ when clinked with another and then strobe when drunk from. It would even ‘sleep’ with a gentle, glowing pulse if left alone on a table. However, best was when a big beat dropped in the venue and every bottle held by every party-goer would start to flash in time with the rhythm of the music.

‘Every bottle becomes part of the party.’ - Forbes

The bottle debuted at Heineken’s dedicated ‘Lounge of the Future’ in Milan but went on to tour events and activations across the world for the following three years - latterly in an evolved design that allowed it to be transferred across bottles and re-used. As well as winning a Design Lion at Cannes, Heineken Ignite was covered by publications from DigiDay and Trend Hunter to Forbes and Fast Company.