How Stella Artois calculated its own artistic heritage

Context

Most beer brands work hard to show off the "type" of person who drinks their beer. If you're Carlsberg, you enlist someone suave and cool and Danish, like Mads Mikkelsen. If you're Birra Morretti, you show some neighbourly Italians drinking and eating and sharing. If you're Stella Artois, you have a bigger list to work from, thanks to the brand's 700 year history.

Objectives

• Find an interesting way to show off both our heritage, and the type of people who drink Stella
• Increase perceptions of quality and heritage for Stella

Strategy

Stella Artois created a series of print and outdoor ads using artworks from famous painters that may show people drinking the brand’s beverage.
Paintings by Manet, Van Gogh and others, all of which show people drinking, were superimposed with a percentage indicating the probability that the people in the pictures are actually drinking Stella Artois. The data point was determined using an algorithm that analysed the year the artwork was painted, its geographical location, the shape of the glass being used, the colour of the liquid, and the distance between the artist and the original brewery.

Outcome

The campaign delivered 7.28 million impressions and reached 6.7 million unique users, and won a Grand Prix in Creative Data, and a Gold in the Print & Publishing and the Outdoor categories at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in 2023.