Over the last few years, younger target groups are increasingly turning away from drinking beer. At the same time, it becomes harder for brands to reach them via traditional channels like TV – since they’re spending lots of time on social platforms like WhatsApp. So, Beck’s was looking for a way to become part of the conversation again. During a time where our target group was flocking to cinemas to see Marvel Superhero films, we came up with the perfect solution: “Heroes of the Night”. The first app that turns every WhatsApp group chat into an individualized superhero comic.

We developed the first mobile app using user-generated, real-time data from WhatsApp group chats to turn you and your friends into heroes of a legendary comic. Every comic is fully customizable and a unique piece of creativity, based on geo- and time-specific context provided by WhatsApp. The time the message is sent determines the time shown on the clocks in the comic! And the location of your night out is reflected in the comic’s title header – for example taking the shape of the Frankfurt skyline or the Hamburg harbor. How we did it? We applied Machine-Learning-based character and image assignment (message sentiment & content) to automatically bring every message to life in shape of a comic hero statement. 10 heroes with a different character each, resembling typical night out personalities in your group of friends: the well-dressed charmer, the talkative one, the diva, and so on.

We wanted to develop an app that allows your WhatsApp group chats to turn into a comic, so the first thing we had to do was: Create a comic! We invented ten different night out heroes, each resembling a typical personality in your group of friends – and brought them to life in more than 300 hand-drawn illustrations, that were digitalized to suit the WhatsApp format and could be shared as jpegs or pdf on all social media platforms. To get there, all you had to do is download the app from the App Store and connect it with WhatsApp. With the tap of a finger, the app automatically generates your comic – assigning the best possible image to every message and according to name, based on chat context and sentiment. All fully created by artificial intelligence and yet completely customizable by yourself.

With a possible 12 billion picture combinations, the app launched simultaneously in 155 markets around the world and quickly became the number third most downloaded App in the German App Store. Activation on owned and paid social media channels resulted in more than 22 million media impressions in the first week alone.