Results and Effectiveness

An overwhelming success, every single one of the 300 seats at GreenSpace was fully booked every night throughout the 3 months operation. 70% of bookings were published to Facebook and 50% of these came from people who had seen friends book tables. People used the campaign to make new friends and a group of more than 30 people formed a ‘GreenSpace gang’ with regular meet-ups. This group of loyal fans became advocates who actively promoted the campaign through word of mouth. In the end, total sales generated were 15% increase on previous years.

Creative Execution

First, awareness of the GreenSpace venue was raised through viral gimmicks under a theme of ‘the Masterpiece’ hosted on the GreenSpace website (including flash games featuring art pieces such as Mona Lisa and Michelangelo’s Statue of David to promote the intended premium theme). Next, we integrated the booking system with a Facebook application so that for each booking users are asked to grant permission to publish booking details on their newsfeed. From these Facebook posts, friends can click back to the website to browse details of the venue, menus, music line-ups and most importantly, a gallery of people who’ve booked tables. Crucially, the more bookings made, the more people hear about it and want to join.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

To differentiate from others, Heineken decided to relocate their 2009 GreenSpace beer park from the ground floor to a rooftop. However this posed a new challenge – away from foot traffic, nobody knew where the venue was. We needed to raise awareness and ensure customers made the effort to reach GreenSpace without stopping off at another brand’s beer park instead. Research indicated that the social drinkers, our target audience, usually drink beer socially as a reason to spend time with friends. Whether online or offline, this group puts priority on being connected with others around them and staying constantly updated with the latest events. The key deciding factor when deciding where to go out is, “Who will be there?” As such, we came up with an online social-media booking system with a mechanism that would allow potential customers to see who else has booked tables each night.