Being headquartered in Amsterdam, they didn’t take into account that each Chinese country, especially those communities in Western countries, have a distinctly different cultural outlook. There are also great differences in the dialects spoken even if the written characters are basically the same. Setting up in phases would allow for adjustments to the system, technology to advance and cultural issues to be researched before promotion went worldwide in offline circles. “Internet time” is fine - but slow and steady wins the race.

Although there were already a few portals established in China, the design, layout, architecture and interfaces were definitely amateurish. The Web had just been freed of some government restrictions and businessmen were rushing to put these sites up as quickly as possible with the aid of, by the nature of the Internet in the country, very inexperienced personnel.

Heineken is positioned as a premium brand. I wanted the site to reflect this by being extremely professional looking. An international approach set in a poignantly localized manner. The validity of the news content of the other portals was always being called into question because of their affiliation with official government news sources. Censorship is obviously a very large issue in China and our research showed that the number one item of interest to mainland Chinese was what’s actually going on in the rest of the world.

Beyond arranging strategic alliances with content providers, in Mandarin, such as CNET, MTV, e-online, China.com and the like - I wanted there to be a particular USP to the site. That is, ‘Duplicating the Experience of a Heineken Bar Online.’ I identified that people go to bars in China to be seen, have good conversation, transact business, listen to music, watch sports and meet people. The news, financial & entertainment content we arranged would take care of a lot of that but the opportunities for communication and business were not yet explored.

Not only is there a great deal of interest within China about the West but also vice-versa. I conceptualized a real-time chat system that would allow on-the-fly translation between Mandarin and English. This would enable people who never had the opportunity to communicate with each other on a personal level to do so. It would also help business people explore contacts for the opening and expanding markets in China (and for Chinese businesses to establish themselves in other markets).

I discovered that a Singaporean government R&D center was far along in machine language translation for this unique language pair but had not really explored a real-world use beyond translating technical manuals for companies such as IBM. By creating a special ‘chat’ dictionary, we projected an accuracy rate of 85%. To ensure people could still be understood, given the nuances of chat-language and slang, I created an iconic interface that would allow people to suppliment their text conversations with universal pictures representing nouns, verbs and adjectives.

These utilities were in addition to regional bar locators by atmosphere, reviews, international classified ads (find long-lost relatives, make business contacts), guides on how to do business in China (in English) and in other countries (in Chinese), branded email, interactive bar games and on and on.

The theme of the site was tied to an international “Great Bars of the World” ad campaign that was running in periodicals such as Time and Newsweek but I wanted to create this as a sub-brand of Heineken for a soft-sell approach. A sponsored by Heineken site.

The next step was creating real-world Heineken CyberCafes with computers, drinks, bands and such that could be promoted on billboards, in taxis, hotels, radio and television.