Heineken 2026 Activating Campaigns & Sponsorships
The runner where friends multiply your score
“Fans Have More Friends” is Heineken’s global campaign platform, created by LePub, and its premise is simple: being a fan is better when you share it. A message about friendship, though, is hard to carry with a commercial alone.
Heineken wanted fans to feel it, not just watch it. So the campaign became a game, built to travel across the brand’s biggest sponsorships: the UEFA Champions League, Formula 1 and music festivals.
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The ask went further than a one-off campaign game. Heineken briefed an always-on platform: one mobile game that could carry “Fans Have More Friends” across football, racing and music, market by market, for years rather than weeks.
That is activating a campaign and sponsorship at its most ambitious: the mechanic itself had to tell the campaign story, not just wear the logo.
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The result is a Y2K-styled endless runner, played straight in the browser. Fans run toward the stadium, the circuit or the festival, swiping past obstacles, and pick up friends along the way. Every friend they high-five joins the run and boosts the score, because fans have more friends.
Three themed worlds carry the sponsorship portfolio: Downtown Champions for the Champions League, Neon Circuit Rush for Formula 1 and Synth Field for festival season. One game, a world per passion, recognizable everywhere it lands.
Picking up a friend on the run to the stadium
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The social layer is the point. After a run, fans sign up and join a crew: matchmaking puts them in a team, crews compete on shared leaderboards, and finding an easter egg lets a player gift a teammate a booster for the next run.
Everything ships from one central platform on fans.heineken.com, behind Heineken’s age gate and localized per market. South Africa went live first, and more markets follow over the coming months.
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At Electric Castle in Romania, the campaign stepped off the phone. Inside the Heineken House we rebuilt the runner as a motion game: fans step onto a mat, a camera reads their movement, and their whole body does the steering while a crowd forms behind them.
Whoever finishes the run spins the prize wheel for Heineken merchandise. That is the point of an experience over an ad: advertising interrupts, this invites, and it lands at the moment fans are most open to it. And the prize means the fan wears the brand for the rest of the weekend.
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