Heineken Overtakes Coca-Cola And Becomes New World’s Most Awarded Advertiser
Heineken, the world’s second largest beer producer, has overtaken Coca-Cola to become the world’s most awarded advertiser in 2016, with campaigns such as Le Big Swim for its Kronenbourg 1664 brand featuring football star-turned-actor Eric Cantona.
The list, published as part of The Gunn Report for Media, combines the winners of media innovation, creativity and advertising effectiveness awards across 40 countries, including the United States, Brazil, China and the United Kingdom and emerging markets such as Colombia and Lebanon. It then awards points to ads based on whether they won best in show, gold, silver or bronze.
Key part of Heineken’s strategy is to use sports, glamor and social success to associate its products with, as is evident from the awarded advertising campaigns.
Advertising, profits and disease
A CNBC report asks: Could award-winning advertising campaigns lead to higher sales?
Heineken reported annual beer volumes topped 200m hl for the first time in 2016. Heineken also recorded a rise by 1.4% in earnings to €20.79 billion.
The top four on the list of top awarded advertisers reads like a who is who of harmful product promotion:
- Heineken
- Coca-Cola
- McDonald’s
- KFC
Their products are associated with an increasing global epidemic of lifestyle diseases (NCDs), driven by the marketing of unhealthy products like beer, sugar-sweetened beverages, and hyper-processed fast food. NCDs (Non-communicable diseases) are driven by four major risk factors, like unhealthy diet and alcohol, and have been called an industrial epidemic for the role that corporations like Heineken are playing in the epidemic.
The World Health Organization reports that of 56 million global deaths in 2012, 38 million, or 68%, were due to NCDs. Every 10 seconds a human being dies because of alcohol (3.3 million deaths annually).
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For further reading
Industrial epidemics and inequalities: The commercial sector as a structural driver of inequalities in non-communicable diseases, by Jeff Collin and Sarah Hill
After charting the rise of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) in the global burden of disease and health inequalities, this chapter outlines the role of unhealthy commodity industries as structural drivers of health inequalities.
Reflecting this assessment, the chapter criticizes contemporary strategies for tackling NCDs for their preoccupation with individual behaviours and relative neglect of the role that private corporations play in these ‘industrial epidemics’. It considers how and why tobacco control represents a notable exception, with tobacco companies increasingly being perceived as vectors of disease from which health policy requires protection, in contrast to alcohol and processed-food industries, which are widely depicted as potential partners in health policy.
The chapter concludes by outlining emergent pressures towards a more coherent approach across tobacco, alcohol, and food policies, considering the implications of such coherence for policy and health inequalities research.”
