#1077 2023 · Hoegaarden (Anheuser-Busch InBev China), campaign by McCann Shanghai · Beer / drinks
Hoegaarden poured its 'first spring' beer out of Shanghai's idle PCR swab-testing booths
the problem
Idle PCR-testing booths lined Shanghai as relics of trauma; a beer brand's 'fresh start' message felt hollow beside them
background
Under China's zero-COVID policy, roadside PCR-testing booths were built across every city to make mass testing efficient; Shanghai alone held roughly 9,000 of them. After the wave of Omicron and the abrupt end of the policy, those booths became instant, useless leftovers scattered along the streets — a constant architectural reminder of stay-home orders, daily swabs, and an estimated million deaths.
Hoegaarden's brief was to launch three new fruit flavours around the idea that this was China's 'first spring' since the pandemic. The obvious route was a glossy spring campaign, but any clean, bright spring ad shipped into a street that was still ringed by silent test booths would land as tone-deaf: the city's own furniture was shouting the very grief the brand wanted to move past. Fighting the booths' symbolism head-on, or ignoring it, would both fail.
what everyone would do
The textbook response is seasonal optimism: a bright spring photo-shoot, flowers and sunlight, pushed through media. That fails because the campaign's own signal is drowned by the physical furniture on every street — the silent test booths voice the grief the brand is trying to counter, so a clean spring ad reads as tone-deaf. The alternative, simply avoiding the booths, also fails, because the booths are everywhere and their presence keeps re-opening the wound no amount of messaging can close.
what they saw
Empty booth was no obstacle but the strongest medium: repurpose the object that ran the pandemic so its gesture — a swab in — becomes a pint out. The relic's memory is the message, the 'first spring' felt, not claimed.
the move
McCann Shanghai repurposed six of the abandoned swab-testing booths into Hoegaarden tasting stations, 'Tuinen Van Hoegaarden'. Each booth kept its original form — stepped Flemish gable, the poppy (Belgium's national flower), and rows of test tubes once used for samples, now flower vases. Pints of peach fruit beer were literally handed to passers-by through the same circular holes that had been cut for nasal swabs to be taken at arm's length. The structure that had administered the pandemic's daily ritual now served the first spring's first drink.
why it works
The campaign converts a symbol that blocks forward motion into one that carries it. The test booth is the single strongest token of the lockdown era, so an audience cannot discount its meaning; when the identical booth now hands out a pint, the contrast does the persuasion no claim could. The physical continuity is load-bearing — the swab hole, the test-tube vases, the booth's silhouette all insist this is the same object that once took samples, which is what makes the reversal land as a genuine 'spring' rather than a decoration. Because the transformation is public and self-evident on the street, it spreads through the medium of the city itself, and each passer-by re-performs the joke by drinking through the swab slot, so the campaign rides an existing symbol she already feels instead of competing against her attention.
the payoff
Per the campaign's own WARC-reported results: brand-related social discussions rose 35% and e-commerce searches surged 149% year-on-year.
where it breaks
It fails when there is no emotionally loaded relic to repurpose, or when the brand that reuses it is the party the public blames for the original pain. It depends on the relic being physically present and publicly acknowledged — a niche or buried object cannot carry the contrast. It fades fast once the trick becomes familiar: in the months after first reuse, repurposing COVID booths turned into a marketing cliché, so the shock that made the first booth work was gone by the time imitators ran the same play. And it needs a genuine, positive next act: if the brand reuses the relic purely to exploit the moment with nothing true to say, the inversion reads as ghoulish rather than hopeful.
what came after
The move joined the wave of repurposed-COVID-infrastructure branding that followed the policy's end, and was featured at the Cannes Lions shortlist stage. Its defining detail — service through the original swab hole — became the transferable idea: let the relic's own mechanics carry your new meaning.
references
- [1]Campaign Asia — From swabs to sips: Hoegaarden flips the script on Covid booths in ChinaCampaign Asia (independent trade press, editorial by Nikita Mishra), 2023aws2.campaignasia.com
- [2]Dao Insights — Hoegaarden beer gives PCR testing booths a new lookDao Insights (independent design & marketing trade media), 2023daoinsights.com
- [3]WARC Effectiveness Ladder — Hoegaarden: First Spring (campaign's self-reported results)WARC (campaign's own submitted results, INTERESTED for outcome figures), 2024warc.com
Widely retold, only partly documented. Filed as hearsay.