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If you’re a faithful reader of this newsletter, which I hope you are, you might have noticed a decidedly European bent to recent editions. Yes, like all great hotel breakfasts, as of late I’ve been going continental:
That covers a decent amount of ground, no?
Mr. Worldwide
But we can always cover more! Which brings me to this phrase: Nieuwezijds Achterburgwal.
Ten points to whomever correctly identified that as Dutch, rather than a cat running across my keyboard. As Google will tell you, that fun little phrase refers to a canal in Amsterdam, which is sort of like saying it refers to a rat in New York.
Why this particular canal? Because, my friends, that canal is the birthplace of this week’s featured brand. So come away with me to the land of bicycles and tulips, and settle in for another tale of creator marketing glory! And while you’re settling in, might I recommend cracking open a nice cold bottle of…
That’s right! Everybody’s favorite Dutch lager (apologies, Grolsch fans), Heineken is not only a solid bet at the bar, but also a standout example of the power of creators. Don’t believe me? Let’s go to the numbers:
This being creator marketing, let’s start with creator count, or the number of creators mentioning Heineken all across the world. Here we see an almost platonic ideal of up-and-to-the-right, steady, staircase-esque growth, with Heineken’s creator count expanding 3x from 2020 to 2024.
Since effective creators tend to post about their favorite brands more than once in any given year—it’s not enough to just post a birthday message!—it follows that Heineken’s post count saw a similar but ultimately even more dramatic growth. In fact, the metric saw a 5x expansion over the course of five years, with Heineken rising from 5.6k posts from its global creator population in 2020 to 29.7k in 2024.
Heineken EMV (Global): 2020 - 2024
If you’re starting to get bored with all this consistent year-over-year growth, I don’t blame you. Ho-hum, another 5x improvement in five years—this time in EMV, where Heineken surged from $17.7M EMV in 2020 to $94.7M EMV in 2024.
But take note! Something’s different here. Unlike Heineken’s creator and post counts, the brand’s EMV growth slowed between 2023 and 2024. Does this imply a similar slowdown for impressions and engagements?
Not just a slowdown, friends—a decline! That’s right: after a steady rise, Heineken’s global impressions dropped slightly between 2023 and 2024, though the brand’s 2024 total remained well above its rate during any previous year. In all, Heineken’s 1.1B total in 2024 represented an 8x surge from its 137.7M mark in 2020.
This got me wondering: did that downward trend for impressions continue into 2025? We only have H1 data to go off, so the numbers won’t be complete, but it should at least be enough to provide a sense of trajectory.
Well, that’s certainly a clear sense of trajectory. Heineken garnered nearly as many global impressions from January to June 2025 (1.1B, but like, smaller than the other 1.1B) as it did in all of 2024. In other words, once you play out July through December 2025, Heineken is poised to not only reverse the trend and grow its impressions once again, but absolutely shatter its previous record.
How does this phenomenon play out for engagements?
Hmm, okay—that’s a sharper drop between 2023 and 2024 than we saw for impressions. But maybe Heineken showed a similar recovery in H1 2025?
Now the picture gets a little more nuanced. At 20.2M engagements through six months, Heineken is on track to outpace its 2024 total of 36.8M engagements. However, that rate is still below the 46M total engagements that Heineken saw in 2023.
So Heineken is rising in impressions, contracting slightly in engagements, but continuing to grow its creator count, post count, and EMV. To me, all of this spells TikTok. But do the numbers bear that out?
To determine the answer, I looked at Heineken’s global totals from July 2024 to June 2025. Here’s a breakdown of how primary social channels contributed to the brand’s impressions:
That certainly seems to bear out the TikTok theory. How about engagements?
Well, this also bears out the TikTok theory: good for impressions, not so much for engagements, which tends to be Instagram’s domain. One metric or platform isn’t better than the other—it’s just a matter of a given brand knowing what it wants to achieve at a specific moment.
From there, I was curious to see whether impressions and engagements are generated along similar patterns: basically, whether they tend to spike around the same moments or events. I don’t think I’d examined this question before, at least not in this newsletter, and what I found surprised me:
On TikTok, Heineken’s impressions were very bound to specific brand moments. Some months, particularly May 2025, saw sudden spikes, while other months saw almost negligible activity.
It was a totally different story on Instagram, where engagements tended to be more evenly distributed, though there was still plenty of month-to-month fluctuation. Some of that uniformity stems from the scales at play with each metric: monthly Instagram engagements top out at just north of 3M, while TikTok impressions peaked at, oh, a cool 400M.
But these differences are notable even despite those alternative orders of magnitude. The graphs indicate that TikTok and Instagram serve diverging functions as platforms when it comes to planning creator marketing moments. For example, how can May 2025 be so lopsided on TikTok and so standard on Instagram? And what happened in May 2025, anyway?
In looking at the data, May stands out for a TikTok campaign featuring Brazilian creators enjoying Heineken during special or sentimental moments, or even just going about their daily routines. The brand also furnished special moments of its own by bringing creators to the Miami Grand Prix, a signature event for another recent HBBIP profilee, Formula 1.
On a grander scale, Heineken’s May 2025 initiatives underscore some of the abiding principles and strengths behind its creator marketing program:
While May might have been Heineken’s most potent month—I’ve seen Brazilian TikTok do crazy numbers for other brands, too—these strategies were on display throughout the past 12 months. Whether Heineken was producing music videos in South Africa, hosting creators at the Heineken Silver Live Out festival in Mexico, or going behind the scenes at Panama Fashion Week, the brand’s reach was undeniable. These market-specific initiatives added up to big global numbers, validating Heineken’s expanding creator and post counts. Keep an eye on the brand in H2 2025 and beyond, because if history is any indication, there’s more growth to come.
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