Background

In China, craft beer is still at infancy with less than 1% market saturation. As one of Shanghai’s most established craft beer breweries, Boxing Cat took it upon themselves to grow the category and created an easy-to-drink Amber Lager as a gateway product to encourage trial and switching (from big, commercialized beer brands). The ask was to create a provocative campaign that will get consumers to know, remember and love both Boxing Cat and their newest Amber Lager, First Blood.

Describe the creative idea

To set the premise, we decided to be honest with the consumer in order to get them to recognize a problem that they didn’t yet know – Commercialized beer brands were making them boring and they didn’t even know it. To combat this plague of ordinary, we brought the brewery’s logo – a cat in boxing gloves – to life, turned him into a superhero and sent him around town to rid the city of ordinary. Accompanied by his own Chinese punk-inspired superhero theme, Louie got to work. He started off by rescuing bored patrons at the bar, before moving to homes where people were drinking sad, lonely and ordinary beers at home, before battling it out with the source of the problem – an Ordinary Beer Monster. The film established Louie’s character, allowing us to build Boxing Cat’s further adventures in fighting ordinary.

Describe the strategy

For the 10 years that Boxing Cat Brewery has existed, its beloved logo has been an icon. To grow the brand, we brought the cat, Louie, to life and through him built the brand’s personality from ground up, including giving it a mission – to be the flag-bearer for an extraordinary life. To cut through the usual beer brand ads, we did what no beer brand in China has done before, which is to create a brand identity that drew inspiration from comic culture. With Marvel movies launching almost every other month in China, we leverage the heightened interest in comics and superheroes to create our very own – the First Blood Amber Lager animation. To make it locally-relevant, the animation featured mundane scenarios that everybody could relate to – goes to the same old bar to binge-watching on the couch. This is when Louie jumped in to shake things

Describe the execution

We wanted the film to be a fun, and funny, superhero adventure. To achieve this, the entire film needed to give viewers the feeling they were being brought through a comic book. We started with our protagonist Louie, whose only appearance before this was only in the brewery’s logo. In over 10 months, we injected life into this two-dimensional depiction, defining his personality, his look (including the fur color of the original feline that gave the brewery its name), and even adding battle scars on him. In addition, we wanted local audiences to feel like they were part of this massive battle, and there were little Easter eggs they could pick out. So, we set the stage in Shanghai, with scenes mimicking the iconic Pearl Tower and other details calling out life in the city. A big part of being extraordinary was, after all, in the details.

List the results

Boxing Cat did not have big budgets to blow on media placements. Instead, we relied on contextual targeting and smart partnerships to give Boxing Cat’s very first campaign the eyeballs it deserves. 15-second cutdowns were served in online TV during binge-watching hours, garnering 14 million impressions over a 2-month period. The brand also engaged key opinion leaders who shared the brand’s spirit to trial the beer and share their stories about living an extraordinary life, which received 2.6 million impressions. Boxing Cat also partnered with One Fighting Champion Ship and Beernanza (Shanghai’s Beer Festival) to create a complete First Blood Amber Lager experience, complete with interactive boxing games and Louie’s actual motorcycle. This brought the brand and the animation 9.25 billion impressions. Having accomplished all that, Boxing Cat sold 200,000 cases of First Blood Amber Lager, with sales increasing every day. And we would say that that is pretty extraordinary.