The back door of a bar led straight to Heineken's front door / HEINEKEN "BAR EXPERIENCE"

The problem

The Dutch hospitality industry was facing an unprecedented labor shortage, with job openings jumping to 112 per 1,000 people, double the usual rate. Bars were being forced to close or cut their hours. Gen Z saw bar jobs as "dead-end work" and had little interest in hospitality careers. For Heineken, bars are literally the channel through which its product reaches people, so this wasn't someone else's problem.

The insight

The skills you build working in a bar—coordination, quick thinking, persuasion, empathy for customers—are exactly the soft skills any company looks for. Heineken, as one of the most attractive employers in Europe, had the influence and credibility to change how the whole industry sees bar experience, simply by taking the lead and treating it as a real hiring qualification. The question was how to make that recognition visible.

The idea

Heineken launched a job platform called Horeca that issues an official badge on LinkedIn to people who work in bars. The badge functions like a diploma: 25 companies, including Coca-Cola, Burger King, Starbucks, PepsiCo, Lipton and McDonald's, agreed to actually factor it in when hiring for corporate roles. At the back doors of bars across the Netherlands, Heineken put up visuals showing Heineken's own headquarters front entrance, with the message "this back door leads to our front door," encouraging bar workers to apply. Heineken became the first company in the world to officially certify bar experience and weigh it in its hiring process.

What happened

The campaign generated 5,000 job applications in two weeks and raised the Net Promoter Score by 8.7 points. Even more striking, the Dutch government was inspired by the initiative to create a fund supporting the hospitality industry. The campaign won a Bronze Lion at Cannes Lions 2023 and was shortlisted at D&AD 2024. It became less of an ad campaign and more of a social movement that reshaped part of an industry.

Afterthought

There's real power in the core idea: letting people proudly put "bar work" on their resume. By turning it into something concrete—a LinkedIn badge—it stopped being just a slogan and became a system people can actually use. And what I love most is how honest it is: Heineken openly admits that protecting bars means protecting its own business, yet it turned that self-interest into something that benefits the whole industry. That's a beautifully built structure. Following Shutter Ads, Heineken and Le Pub have once again found a way to save the bars.

Awards

• Cannes Lions Gold 2024

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