Harbin has long been China’s favorite beer amongst legal age young adults. Yet with increasing competition, they are losing traction with their core audience and are beginning to be seen as less youthful. The objective is to reinforce our association with legal age drinking and reclaim the youth audience.

FROM A YEAR OF BEING EXCLUDED TO A LIFETIME OF FEELING EXCLUSIVE

When millions were counting down to the New Year, we counted down to one person’s first legal beer – Tian Jimo, the last person to turn 18 in the last minute of 2018 and the last to reach the legal drinking age in China. Having spent all year excluded from drinking with other 18-year-old peers, we gave her a very exclusive first drink by creating the world's first AI facial recognition beer tap programmed to recognise and serve only her.

SPEAKING TO MILLIONS BY SPEAKING TO JUST ONE

If there’s one thing every young drinker goes through, it’s the anticipation of approaching the legal drinking age upon turning 18. With millions of people in China turning 18 every year, the predictable approach was to create something that each of them can relate to.

Instead we directed our efforts at one person with a very unique status to intrigue the millions.

We gave Tian Jimo a unique 18th birthday present - an AI facial recognition beer tap. As the gift was a surprise, we had to train the AI without ever seeing Tian Jimo in person. Using machine learning, we trained the AI with over 2 million different faces, along with positive identification of 10 photos of Tian Jimo from her social media accounts. Then we refined the system by manually feeding hundreds of modifications to her face to train the negative tolerances and mitigate poor lighting conditions at the party. Finally we built a custom UI that guided the beer tap user’s face into exactly the right position for recognition. 31st Dec 2018, 23:59hrs. As the world counted down to welcome 2019, Harbin gave Tian Jimo her very own countdown to her first sip of beer from a personal AI beer tap that she activated for the first time.

THE COUNTDOWN THAT LASTED 11 DAYS

To date, we have registered over 700 million media impressions, commanding a viewership larger than the crowd from all the New Year countdown parties put together that night.

While coverage of countdown parties elsewhere ended the next day, we enjoyed 11 days of continuous news coverage across more than 100 global and national news platforms – 85.4% of which were organic coverage, including China Daily, the country’s flagship English-language news platform.

Excited netizens have now stepped forward claiming to be the person to turn 18 in 2019, hoping to score their own tap.

By winning the heart of one 18-year-old, we won back the hearts of millions and cemented Harbin's status as the beer for legal age drinkers