The brief was simple: Make Tuborg cool again and grow BUMO 2%.

Since launching in China, Tuborg had rocketed to a top ten international beer becoming a symbol of cool along the way with its fresh taste and brand platform of championing free spirits. Tuborg had also launched a groundbreaking music platform building collaboration between local and international artists.

However Tuborg hadn’t kept up with trends and had failed to connect with the new generation of 18-24s. BUMO was at 1% as sales were lost to locally produced copycat beers. Image had eroded as the center of youth culture fragmented from music to across gaming, social and smartphones. Tuborg had actually become so uncool it was the butt of jokes and regularly mocked on social.

So, the objective was to connect with 18-24s and reestablish cool credentials to make 18-24s feel good holding a bottle of Tuborg.

The idea was: ‘NO MORE NEXT TIME!’

In China, “Having Fun” is looked on disapprovingly versus work or study. This has left youth conflicted between their burning desire to go out for fun times or answering family/societal expectations by staying home to study or focus on career.

As China’s economy moved forward, the pressure to forgo fun for career was increasing dramatically and research showed youth frustration was reaching boiling point.

One insights was how youth had become increasingly imaginative with excuses they used to not join ‘fun times’ so to appease families but without alienating friends. This had birthed a social phenomena: the ‘But Next Time…’ meme, echoing the phrase these excuses always ended with.

‘Next time’ was the exact opposite of what youth was yearning to do hence we decided to go right to the center of the issue with a powerful message: ‘NO MORE NEXT TIME!’

Our strategy was simple: Champion Youth by bringing their issues into the public conversation with an audacious, unmissable call to arms.

The fun versus work conflict was buried deep into social – the only place youth felt comfortable discussing it. Meanwhile, our competitors were just leveraging celebrity endorsements without any real proximity to youth.

So we would make an unequivocal statement demonstrating our support for free spirits whilst forcing youth and families to engage and resolve issues around fun versus work.

Ground zero was to be Chongqing; a mega city of 24m beer drinkers and Tuborg’s adopted hometown in China.

We selected China’s deepest staircase: the interchange between Chongqing’s Metro Line 5 and 6. Used by over 1m people per day, this Chongqing landmark has 300 steps and descends 94m – higher than the statue of liberty.

This was the perfect solution to make that unmissable call to arms.

To create the content we reached out to youth themselves:

During May 2018 we partnered Zhihu, China’s Quora, inviting netizens to share and upvote the most ridiculous “Next Time” excuses they had ever heard.

Firstly we used this to start a nationwide conversation around fun priming our core 18-24.

Then we painted each of the top 300 upvoted excuses on its own step of the interchange. The rest of the interchange we wrapped in Tuborg branding with messages championing free spirits creating an unmissable brand engagement.

Taking a minimum of 3 minutes to cross the interchange, youth and family were both immersed with these shameless excuses and a clear message from Tuborg of “NO MORE NEXT TIME”.

A PR campaign then launched ensuring the mainstream media pushed the Turbog interchange takeover as well as the issues behind it.

Paid social was used to amplify PR, UGC and social buzz.

When the corridor went live, the reaction was immediate across both social and mainstream media talking the event nationwide and shaking cultural foundations.

The interchange itself achieved 85m impressions over 3 weeks or 4.3m hours of brand engagement.

In addition we achieved 1.3bn impressions across paid, owned and earned.

We also tracked +300 separate discussions on Zhihu with many more taking place on Weibo & WeChat.

The PR campaign achieved 2m USD in free expose.

BUMO leapt to 7%, more than twice the target, while brand awareness increased by 12% whilst our competitors’ scores all dropped.

Social buzz swung from being predominantly negative to exclusively positive as youth responded to bold statement we had made on their behalf.

And thanks to Tuborg, a generation has been emboldened to feel they can again open up and explore life.

And all from one staircase.