DREAM RACE
- Brand
- KIRIN
- Year
- 2014
- Objective
- Engagement
- Industry
- Food & Drink
- Mechanic
- Racing & Sports
- Platform
- Web
- Agency
- BIRDMAN
Objective
Kirin Beverage used the campaign to put its entire soft-drink lineup in front of consumers at once, with each visitor backing one specific product as their own racer. Because a car's performance depended on the likes and retweets it picked up, every participant had to pull friends in from social media, turning the promotion into a self-propagating campaign for Kirin's drinks.
Solution
Players signed in with their Twitter or Facebook account and picked one of 17 Kirin drinks as their bottle-car, a real bottle rebuilt into a radio-controlled racer. They then watched a live broadcast of their car running a real 16-metre track built with slopes, headwind sections, and dips, with a small screen on the car showing the racer's own social avatar. As friends liked and retweeted on their behalf, those reactions turned into energy balls loaded onto the car, giving it extra acceleration on the downhill stretches. Races ran on a schedule through the day, and once a heat wrapped, players could pull it back up anytime by clicking their icon in the archive of past runs.
- 1
The player opens a campaign site showing a live broadcast of a race: real bottles of Kirin beverages, rebuilt into remote-control racing cars, running on a physical track — footage so slick that press coverage mistook it for CG.
- 2
The player logs in with a Twitter or Facebook account to enter, then picks one of 17 Kirin drink bottles, each rebuilt as a race car, as the vehicle representing them.
- 3
The player registers for the next scheduled heat rather than racing on demand; heats run throughout the day in a fixed local time window, and the player waits for their assigned slot. A small screen mounted on the player's car displays their social-media avatar during the race.
- 4
Instead of driving, the player campaigns for support: sharing the race entry on social media so friends can like and retweet it, with each reaction converted into an "energy ball."
- 5
Energy balls are loaded onto the car as physical weight, and extra weight builds better speed on the track's climbs and descents — so the more friends engage, the faster the player's bottle races.
- 6
At the scheduled time, the player watches a live stream of their own heat: bottle-cars launch down a 16-meter track of rises and drops, hitting obstacles such as pits and headwind zones that knock some cars out before the finish, making each heat a survival race.
- 7
The heat ends with a finish line; whoever places first wins a prize pack of ten Kirin beverages.
- 8
Past heats stay accessible afterward — clicking any participant's icon plays back the archived footage of their run, letting visitors browse other players' races even without competing themselves.
