How Zywiec Turned Festival Fandom Into a Viral Creative Engine
Zywiec's 'The Verse' is a July 2014 digital campaign created by agency Gong in Poland, in which an online application allowed users to write personalised lyrics for the rock track 'Electrical', performed by Polish rock musicians, generating a unique rendered video for each participant.
Zywiec, the Polska-based brewer and main sponsor of the 'Male Music' festival, commissioned Gong to build something that moved well beyond conventional sponsor visibility. The result was an interactive platform tied directly to the festival's cultural currency: live rock music. Users did not merely watch content — they shaped it. Each participant contributed a custom verse to 'Electrical', a track performed by some of Poland's most prominent rock artists, and received a personalised video of the song incorporating their own words. The mechanic transformed every participant into a credited co-creator rather than a passive viewer, a distinction that proved central to the campaign's organic spread across the Polish digital landscape.
The campaign launched in July 2014 in Poland, timed to align with the summer festival season and Zywiec's sponsorship activation at 'Male Music'. The digital medium was the sole channel, according to clapboard.com, with the campaign containing one primary media asset — the application itself. That single asset became the engine of a participatory content network, each user-generated video functioning as its own distribution unit. The Verse earned a Clapboard Score of 72 out of 100, reflecting its structural strength as a participatory digital format that positioned users as co-creators. Target keywords across the campaign's reception — Recreation, Leisure, Travel, VFX, Poland 2014 — reflect the broader summer cultural context Zywiec was deliberately activating within.
Zywiec held an estimated 27% share of the Polish beer market in 2014, according to En Wikipedia, operating within a landscape where three brewers — Kompania Piwowarska, Grupa Zywiec, and Carlsberg Polska — collectively controlled approximately 80% of Polish beer volume at the end of that year, per en.wikipedia.org. That concentration made brand differentiation a critical battleground. Kompania Piwowarska, home to Tyskie, Lech, and Zubr, held an estimated 33% share according to en.wikipedia.org, making it Zywiec's most direct competitor for mainstream lager drinkers. Carlsberg Polska represented the third major force in the market.
The strategic context sharpened the rationale for The Verse. According to Assets Kpmg, mainstream beer's share of total Polish beer sales volume declined from nearly 88% in 2008 to 82% in 2013, a structural signal that the category was fragmenting and that younger consumers were exercising greater selectivity. Lager still represented approximately 91% of total beer volume in 2014, per assets.kpmg.com, but the direction of travel was clear: brand salience, not just availability, would determine loyalty. Zywiec's decision to anchor its summer activation to the 'Male Music' festival — and to build a digital tool around that sponsorship — reflected a deliberate move to associate the brand with cultural participation rather than passive consumption. Festival sponsorship alone generates awareness; an interactive application generates data, dwell time, and social proof. The Verse pursued all three simultaneously, positioning Zywiec as a brand that amplifies the recreational and leisure pursuits of its audience rather than simply advertising alongside them.
Agency Gong built The Verse around a deceptively simple mechanic: personalised lyric input rendered into a fully produced music video. The creative challenge was not ideation but engineering — producing a system capable of generating individualized video outputs at scale while maintaining the sonic and visual coherence of a professional rock recording.
The song 'Electrical', performed by named Polish rock artists, served as the fixed creative spine. Users supplied a single variable element — their own verse — and the application wove that contribution into the track, rendering a shareable video that felt genuinely personalised rather than templated. The VFX and production infrastructure required to execute this at volume represented a meaningful technical investment, one that distinguished The Verse from simpler user-generated content mechanics that rely on static image overlays or text-only customisation. Every output had to hold together as a credible piece of music video content, because it was that credibility that gave participants reason to share. Production credits for The Verse are not publicly documented beyond the agency attribution to Gong, per clapboard.com. What the available record does confirm is that the campaign's creative architecture was engineered for virality by design: the personalised output was both the product and the distribution vehicle, each video carrying the Zywiec brand identity into the social feeds of users who had actively invested creative effort in making it. In the context of Poland's 2014 digital environment, during the peak of the summer travel and leisure season, that combination of cultural relevance, technical novelty, and personal ownership proved a precise fit for the audience Zywiec needed to reach.
The Verse reached approximately 500,000 users in Poland, according to clapboard.com, with approximately 150,000 personalised videos created by participants, also per clapboard.com. Those figures, for a single-country digital campaign operating in July 2014 without paid amplification driving the stated scale, indicate a meaningful organic diffusion rate: roughly one in three users who engaged with the campaign produced a video, a conversion ratio that reflects genuine participation rather than passive exposure.
The campaign received formal industry recognition at two levels. At the IAB Poland MIXX Awards 2014, The Verse won Best-in-Show, the Innovation Award, and the Online Video category, according to linkedin.com. At the European MIXX Awards 2015, the campaign won Silver in both the Branded Content and Interactive Video categories, according to awardsarchive.com. No verified awards were found for the campaign at Cannes Lions, Effie Awards, One Show, D&AD, Clio Awards, Webby Awards, or WARC Awards, per clapboard.com. The dual Silver recognition at the European MIXX Awards placed The Verse among the strongest interactive digital campaigns produced in Europe that year, validating both its branded content strategy and its technical execution as an interactive video platform. The Clapboard Score of 72 out of 100 reflects the campaign's structural integrity as a participatory format, acknowledging its creative ambition and measurable scale while noting the absence of broader cross-market rollout or documented long-term brand impact data. Within the Recreation and Leisure category, and specifically within Poland's 2014 digital advertising landscape, The Verse stands as a durable example of festival sponsorship transformed into genuine creative participation.
The Verse was a July 2014 digital campaign by Zywiec and agency Gong in Poland. Users wrote personalised lyrics for the rock track 'Electrical', performed by Polish rock artists, and received a unique rendered video of the song. The campaign reached approximately 500,000 users, according to clapboard.com.
Approximately 150,000 personalised videos were created by users, according to clapboard.com. Each video incorporated the participant's own verse into a fully produced version of 'Electrical', making every output a unique, shareable piece of branded content tied to Zywiec's 'Male Music' festival sponsorship in Poland.
The Verse won Best-in-Show, the Innovation Award, and Online Video at the IAB Poland MIXX Awards 2014, per linkedin.com. It also won Silver in Branded Content and Silver in Interactive Video at the European MIXX Awards 2015, according to awardsarchive.com. No verified wins were found at Cannes Lions or D&AD.
Agency Gong created The Verse for Zywiec, launching it in Poland in July 2014, per clapboard.com. Gong built the online application that powered the personalised lyric and video generation mechanic, positioning Zywiec's festival sponsorship of 'Male Music' as an interactive creative platform rather than a conventional sponsor presence.
Zywiec held an estimated 27% share of the Polish beer market in 2014, according to en.wikipedia.org, competing directly with Kompania Piwowarska, which held approximately 33%. The Verse used festival sponsorship and interactive VFX technology to build brand differentiation through cultural participation, addressing a market where mainstream beer share was declining, per assets.kpmg.com.
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