Posted by A funny commercial was released by Heineken in 2024, making fun of the beer’s name: let’s discover the background song.
Self-irony is an excellent quality. It’s also something that can rarely apply to a brand, but here we have it: for its 150th anniversary, the Dutch beer produced a short ad that jokes about its own brand name. Apparently, every country pronounces it differently. “Hekkene,” “Moneken,” “Heini”… based on every language we are fluent in, we tend to use many (wrong) words, trying to refer to the “green” bottle.
The result is pretty hilarious. You can watch the Heineken commercial aired in 2024 below.
There is also an extraordinary cameo. When the Asian girl in the middle of the commercial orders a “Hakkinen,” the camera shifts to Mika Hakkinen in person. After all, the Finnish double Formula 1 world champion has a surname that sounds much like “Heineken,” so his presence in the commercial makes everything epic. We don’t know if he was already aware that people sometimes say his name when ordering a beer, but that’s indeed helpful knowledge if you need to co-exist with your surname, right?
Moreover, the track you hear in the background is a classic belonging to the golden years of new wave music, and it adds a unique energy to the ad. The song in the 2024 Heineken commercial is Ça plane pour moi by Plastic Bertrand. You can listen to it in full streaming below.
Plastic Bertrand is Roger François Jouret, a Belgian musician who’s been active since 1977, and Ça plane pour moi is its debut song, his most famous production. It became an authentic anthem of punk and new wave at the end of the 70s. The song is a perfect example of the post-punk spirit of those years: it was conceived as a parody of punk music, with nonsense lyrics and the usage of three simple chords. The message behind those choices represented a hidden reference to punk’s technical simplicity. Yet, an icon of the punk movement, Joe Strummer, publicly praised the song, saying in an interview it was “probably a lot better than a lot of so-called punk records.” The song’s title is a French expression meaning “this works for me.”
With that song in the background and all those people showing up from different club scenes worldwide, a lot of energy flows in the Heineken commercial. It’s one of those cases where the background music stays easily stuck in our heads for days: now you know why.
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