Heineken x Nokia — The Boring Phone

The Brief

Headline Athens needed to bring the Heineken x Nokia "Boring Phone" campaign to life across bars and pubs throughout Greece.

The activation invited drinkers to cheer with a Heineken, triggering an immediate on-screen prize draw displayed on a life-size build of a Heineken-branded 1990s Nokia handset. The goal was simple: put Heineken at the centre of a memorable, shareable moment and reward customers in real time.

The Challenge

The hardware had to be built, tested, and shipped from the UK to Greece, to a physical casing Brunyee Studio never had direct access to.

Once on-site, non-technical operators needed to tune motion sensitivity themselves across 48 different venue environments, each with different lighting, foot traffic, and spacing conditions. A misconfigured sensor at any venue meant the experience either failed to trigger or fired constantly. Neither was acceptable for a brand activation in front of customers.

What I Built

• A self-contained physical unit that required one screw to mount. Operators could set up and move between venues without technical support on-site.
• Adjustable motion detection with a physical sensitivity dial. Non-technical staff could fine-tune the sensor for each venue environment without touching any code or configuration files.
• A real-time communication layer between sensor hardware and the on-screen experience. Motion events were read, validated, debounced, and acknowledged before triggering the prize draw, preventing false activations from crowd movement or ambient interference.
• Automatic startup and kiosk-mode display on power-on. The unit was live and ready the moment it was plugged in, with no manual launch steps required.
• Remote access, error tracking, and over-the-air update capability. Issues could be diagnosed and resolved from the UK without requiring a technician on-site in Greece.
• An admin panel for live prize management. Operators could adjust prize quantities on the fly throughout each event night without interrupting the experience.

Stack: Raspberry Pi, Python, GPIO, IR sensors, SvelteKit, WebSockets, Linux

Go-Live

Both units toured a total of 48 bars and pubs across Greece over the campaign window, operating across separate venues simultaneously. As expected, each new venue required a quick sensitivity adjustment from the on-site operator.

The physical dial worked exactly as designed, and no technical intervention was needed at any point.

The prize draw system ran without incident across the full tour.

Remote access was configured and available throughout, but was never needed.

The Outcome

• Over 19,200 interactions across 48 venues with both units during the campaign window.
• Zero hardware or software incidents across the full tour.
• On-site sensitivity tuning handled entirely by non-technical operators at every venue.
• Campaign launched on schedule and operated without remote intervention.
• Headline Athens cited the quality of documentation and non-technical controls as a stand-out delivery factor.

Why It Worked

The hardware and software were treated as a single system from day one, not two separate workstreams bolted together at the end. Every decision: sensor choice, cable length, the physical dial, the admin panel, the remote access setup, was made with the on-site operator in mind, not the engineer who built it. That meant Headline Athens could run a technically complex activation across twelve without a developer in the room.