On a drab winter’s day several years ago, the head office of the Franzen Hey & Veltman (FHV) advertising agency just outside Amsterdam was in a state of unusual agitation. Two of the agency’s directors, Giep Franzen and Tejo Hollander, were peering nervously out from the hallway through the drizzling rain, watching an unusual convoy glide up to the entrance.
At the back of the middle vehicle, a huge armoured Bentley, sat Alfred ‘Freddy’ Heineken, the man who held the Heineken beer empire in his hands. His limousine was sandwiched between the heavy cars of the ‘boys’ who accompanied the brewer ever since he had been kidnapped in 1983. The previous day three of them had thoroughly inspected the FHV building, searching the room where Freddy was to view two proposed adverts and even checking the projector for potential firing devices.
The team at FHV had prepared the forthcoming pitch down to the last detail. They didn’t waste much time on introductory presentations because they knew that Freddy couldn’t be bothered to listen to them. On the eve of such nerve-racking events, it was the guest list that topped the agenda. ‘From experience, we knew that Freddy liked to make a show of his power by taking shocking decisions. And the bigger the audience, the more irrepressible the urge’, one of them explained. ‘So the trick was to keep the invitation list as short as possible.’
Although many hard-boiled entrepreneurs walked through the agency’s corridors, Freddy’s twice-yearly visits always made the ad-men jittery. They esteemed the mercurial tycoon highly for his instinct for advertising and his creativity. ‘It never ceased to amaze us. Inevitably and instantly, he always picked the best lines’, said Marlies Ponsioen, a former Heineken account manager at FHV. But Freddy’s disciples also knew that his unpredictable mood swings could be devastating.
Allan van Rijn, the man who directed FHV’s Heineken adverts at the time, knew precisely how Freddy and his ad-men operated. He explained that in preparation for Freddy’s visits ‘the receptionists all had their hair done, the mess was cleaned up and the managers wore their best three-piece suits. After all, their mortgages were at stake. Then Freddy stepped out of his limo with a crumpled suit and he walked straight through all this bullshit.’
Freddy himself liked to recall that his legendary affinity with advertising was inspired by a school trip to the Philips lighting and electronics group in Eindhoven. ‘They didn’t sell light bulbs; they sold light’, he explained. Since he returned from an eye-opening two-year traineeship in the United States in his early twenties, the grandson of Heineken’s founder had meticulously constructed the brand’s identity so that it appealed to consumers throughout the world.
As planned, the diminutive tycoon arrived early in the afternoon. After a couple of handshakes in the hallway, he was ushered into the plain meeting room on the first floor of the FHV offices, which had a projector concealed behind a one-way mirror on one side and a screen on the other side.
As the lights went out and the curtains were drawn, all those present turned discreetly to Freddy Heineken and anxiously scrutinised the deep grooves in his bulldog-like face. The slightest tension on his lips, the merest hint of a frown – even the way he puffed at his seemingly never-ending ultra-light cigarette – could be an omen of a forthcoming disaster. After all, Heineken was one of the most avidly watched accounts in advertising, and Freddy ruled over it with the tyrannical edge that characterised his entire leadership.
Since he had regained his family’s majority share in Heineken in his mid-twenties, Freddy ruled over an efficient brewing group that made a crisp lager. This he transformed into a brewing group with an unrivalled international scope, all the while keeping watch in an almost paranoid fashion over the sprawling business, and the brand’s reputation in particular.
Few outside the Netherlands realised that Heineken was the name not just of a beer but also of the uncrowned king of the Netherlands – an extravagant yet utterly ordinary billionaire, who could be both irresistibly charming and outrageously vulgar. Reviled by some, he was hailed by others for turning a relatively bland beer into an iconic global brand.
Freddy had a few strict rules for success. Only in the United Kingdom did Heineken deviate from its recipe – in more ways than one. Yet even there Freddy Heineken was much lauded for supporting a whimsical advertising campaign that became iconic and placed Heineken at the forefront of the Lager Revolution.
FHV and Heineken’s advertising staff had spent about three months and 1.2 million guilders on the commercials to be screened by the magnate. Replicating an earlier concept, they consisted of short, fast-cut film fragments accompanied with fitting soundbites – for instance, there was a glass of beer that whooshed across a bar to the sound of a roaring engine.
‘Again, Mr Heineken?’ Franzen inquired gently when the reel stopped. Because normally, when Freddy liked the commercials, he smiled contentedly and asked to watch them again. But this time the chairman looked hideously under-whelmed. ‘Not funny at all’, he grumbled – and that, in Heineken’s vocabulary, was tantamount to a death sentence. ‘It was like a volcano erupting in our faces’, said one of the participants. ‘There was stunned silence. All of us turned white. We knew it would have been completely pointless to protest.’
The shocked ad-men only found out several weeks later what it was that had offended Freddy: a short sequence with two dogs smooching under bar stools. It was meant to be a little edgy, but in retrospect even the director acknowledged that Heineken had been right. ‘Before the presentation Freddy had probably had a drink in a bar in Amsterdam with Joe Bloggs’, said Van Rijn. ‘He knew the guy who handled the projector at the agency even better than the directors. That way he could tell, without fail, how the general public would react.’ As often in such cases, the dust quickly settled. The shot with the drooling dogs was edited out, and the adverts were used. Again Freddy Heineken had got his way, and with the briefest of comments.
Over the previous years Heineken had made headlines for reasons ranging from his eye-catching billionaire toys and adventures to his royal friendships and spectacular kidnapping. But when it came to his company, Heineken proved relentless and utterly consistent. He was the man behind the extraordinary story of Heineken, made of adventurous deals, clever marketing and just the right amount of froth.