Heineken's Forgotten Beers campaign, created by LePub for International Beer Day 2024 in the Netherlands, reframes beer as a catalyst for human connection
ARCHIVEHow Heineken Turned Forgotten Beers Into a Celebration of Friendship
Heineken's "Forgotten Beers" campaign is a 2024 film created by LePub for International Beer Day, launching in the Netherlands, that argues the best part of having a beer is not the beer itself but the friendships and social moments it makes possible.
Published in September 2024 and timed to International Beer Day, "Forgotten Beers" marks a deliberate departure from conventional beer advertising. Where most campaigns in the alcoholic drinks category place the product at the centre of every frame — the pour, the condensation, the first sip — Heineken and LePub invert the logic entirely. The beer becomes incidental. What matters is everything that happens around it: the conversation that runs long, the pool game that pulls everyone away from their pint, the party moment where a bottle is set down and simply never picked up again.
The campaign carries a single, memorable proposition — "the best part of having a beer isn't the beer" — and builds its entire narrative architecture around that idea. In the Netherlands, where Heineken holds the position of the country's most internationally recognised beer brand, launching a campaign that sidelines the product itself is a calculated creative risk. The brand does not ask audiences to admire its lager. It asks them to recognise themselves in the scenes unfolding on screen, and to associate Heineken not with a drink but with the quality of time spent together. The film medium, produced through Tempomedia Filmproduktion GmbH and directed by Alex Feil, gives the campaign the emotional range and observational texture that the premise demands.
Heineken positions "Forgotten Beers" as a response to a clear consumer insight: contemporary drinkers increasingly value the social experiences surrounding alcohol consumption over the product itself. In the Netherlands and across mature beer markets, this shift in consumer motivation creates both a challenge and an opening for established lager brands.
The global beer market is a growing market, and lager remains its dominant segment, with lager representing approximately 76.1% of global beer revenue in 2024, according to Grand View Research. Heineken N.V. ranks as the second-largest global brewer by volume, sitting behind Anheuser-Busch InBev, which holds approximately 25.5% of the global market share, according to Statista. That competitive reality — operating as a challenger to AB InBev's scale while simultaneously defending premium positioning against regional craft competitors — shapes the brand's creative strategy. Rather than competing on product claims that a dominant rival can match or exceed, Heineken competes on cultural meaning and emotional territory.
LePub's strategic framing, documented on Le Pub, describes the campaign as a commitment to celebrating "the good times and not to the beer" on International Beer Day 2024. This is not a retreat from product pride but an intensification of Heineken's long-established experiential positioning. The brand has built decades of advertising around the idea that its beer enables great social occasions. "Forgotten Beers" takes that positioning to its logical extreme: if the occasion is the point, then the beer can afford to be forgotten. In the Netherlands, where beer culture is deeply woven into social ritual, that argument lands with particular credibility.
Alex Feil directs "Forgotten Beers" for Heineken through Tempomedia Filmproduktion GmbH, working with Boomerang Create to capture the unscripted texture of real social gatherings. The production approach prioritises observational authenticity over product glamour, a choice that aligns precisely with the campaign's central argument.
Director of photography Paul Guilhaume shoots the film in a manner that follows people rather than products, allowing the camera to dwell on faces, gestures and group dynamics rather than lingering on the Heineken bottle or glass. Executive producer Vera Portz and producer Gunnar Meyer oversee a production that requires this kind of disciplined restraint — the temptation in beer advertising to return to the product is strong, and resisting it at every cut is a genuine craft decision. Editors Iain Whitewright and Fabrizio Squeo shape the pacing of the film, assembling a series of recognisable social vignettes — conversations that outrun drinks, games that pull people from their glasses, parties where a beer sits untouched on a surface while its owner is somewhere else entirely, laughing.
The sound and music layers of the campaign are handled by Disc2Disc for sound design and Sizzer Amsterdam for music, with music supervisor Richard Aardenburg and music producer Mees van der Velde contributing to the emotional tone. Post-production is managed across GABHA Studios and Prodigious Frankfurt, with colorist Matthieu Toullet giving the film a warm, naturalistic palette that reinforces the sense of genuine human moments rather than constructed advertising tableaux. The Drum named "Forgotten Beers" its Ad of the Day, according to The Drum, praising the campaign as a humorous and warm tribute to beers abandoned mid-conversation — a recognition that the execution earns the sincerity of its premise.
ARCHIVEHeineken's "Forgotten Beers" earns a Clapboard Score of 67 out of 100, reflecting a campaign that executes its creative premise with confidence and craft but operates within a well-established strategic framework for the brand rather than breaking entirely new ground.
Documented performance data for the campaign includes 43,740 views, 537 likes and 50 comments on the primary published asset, as recorded on clapboard.com. The Drum's designation of the film as Ad of the Day, as reported by The Drum, confirms the campaign's resonance within the advertising and creative industries, an indicator of craft quality that typically precedes broader cultural recognition.
Structurally, the campaign demonstrates several conditions associated with effective brand film. The creative proposition — that the beer is forgettable precisely because the moment is not — is genuinely counterintuitive for a beer brand, and counterintuitive advertising consistently earns disproportionate attention and recall. The film's observational realism, achieved through the combined effort of director Alex Feil, director of photography Paul Guilhaume and editors Iain Whitewright and Fabrizio Squeo, gives audiences recognisable social scenarios rather than aspirational tableaux, which increases the likelihood of personal identification. In the Netherlands, where the campaign originates and where Heineken's brand identity is most deeply embedded in daily culture, that identification carries particular weight. The campaign also benefits from the clarity of International Beer Day as a calendar hook, giving both media and audiences a shared frame of reference that amplifies organic reach.
Heineken's Forgotten Beers is a 2024 film campaign created by LePub for International Beer Day in the Netherlands. It argues that the best part of having a beer is not the beer itself but the friendships and social moments that surround it, positioning Heineken as a facilitator of human connection rather than simply a beverage.
Alex Feil directs the Heineken Forgotten Beers film through Tempomedia Filmproduktion GmbH, working alongside Boomerang Create. Director of photography Paul Guilhaume shoots the film with an observational approach that keeps the focus on human moments and social interactions rather than on the Heineken product itself.
LePub, specifically LePub Milan, creates the Heineken Forgotten Beers campaign for International Beer Day 2024. The agency frames the work as a commitment to celebrating the good times and not the beer itself, according to le.pub, inverting the conventional logic of alcoholic drinks advertising to centre social experience over product.
Heineken's Forgotten Beers campaign launches around International Beer Day on August 2, 2024, with publication recorded in the Netherlands in September 2024. The film medium campaign contains one primary media asset and is classified within the alcoholic drinks category, timed precisely to the global beer celebration occasion.
Heineken's Forgotten Beers earns a Clapboard Score of 67 out of 100, according to Clapboard. The score reflects confident creative execution and a well-crafted observational film, while acknowledging that the campaign intensifies Heineken's existing experiential positioning rather than establishing an entirely new strategic or creative direction for the brand.
Forgotten Beers sits within Heineken's 2024 strategy of leading with social experience over product heroism. In the same year, according to mediapost.com, Heineken also launched There Is More Behind the Star featuring actor Benicio del Toro, reinforcing a consistent brand direction that values cultural meaning and human connection over conventional lager advertising claims.
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