The Brief

Heineken Green Room (aka HGR) is an exclusive invite-only music event that has been taking place for more than a decade. When it first launched in 2002 in Singapore, there was a lack of massive music festivals like Laneway and global music acts rarely traveled to our island state. But in the last decade, this changed dramatically. More brands were using music to connect to their audiences, and there was an abundance of festivals, concerts and music events. In 2013, HGR had to work harder to differentiate itself and be a night to remember. To fuel conversations and excitement, we built a revolutionary multi-sensorial music experience that would debut at HGR 2013.

The big idea was Music You Can Smell– a world’s first clubbing experience that added a new sensory dimension to music. This was an innovative yet intuitive pairing with both music and scent having high, mid and low notes and both being emotive drivers. To bring this idea to life, we collaborated with perfumers, scent experts, pneumatic engineers, and DJs to create The Scenthesizer – a unique device that gives DJs the ability to customize the mood and atmosphere of their sets by using the power of scent. Our prototype was fairly simple – it was a fiber-glass build with 12 scent diffusers, 2 vortex cannons, and a custom touch-based DJ control. Six bespoke scents were created for the night and were dispersed through the diffusers. The vortex cannons helped to visualize the scent release as massive smoke rings. Heineken Green Room would serve as the stage to unveil this innovative new piece of technology. Firstly, we created intrigue around The Scenthesizer. We crafted customized scents for our VIP guests, specifically developed based on the invitees music tastes, and delivered the scents to them in HGR test tubes. We created special making-of videos detailing the technology and how it all came together, providing glimpses of the hardware. We shared these videos with the press, seeded them through partner media and uploaded them onto our YouTube channel. At the event itself, the guests entered through a specially built scent tunnel, as a teaser to the machine itself, before arriving at The Scenthesizer.

We had three key objectives for this campaign: Objective 1: Create a great event experience. * 83.05% agreed with the statement ‘This event is distinctive from other music events’. Objective 2: Drive mass awareness & reach of HGR This campaign generated press coverage from over 200 articles and social media mentions and posts that included global blogs like TrendHunter and PSFK. In total, we received 84 million impressions** valued at around S$495,000.*** Objective 3: Position Heineken as the clear leader in the nightlife scene.**** ‘Heineken is an innovative brand’ grew by 9%. ‘Heineken is the leading international brand’ grew by 31%. The Scenthesizer has also garnered interest from other Heineken markets and is likely to be rolled out at other Heineken music events in the near future. * Source: Based on exit interviews ** Source: Internal PR assessment – (sum of reach of individual publications) *** Source: Internal PR assessment – (approximately S$7500 per publication) **** Source: TNS MLBT Sep 2013 vs Sep 2012