Ghosted Bar

Heineken's global "Ghosted" campaign addressed a specific cultural pressure: in Singapore and Malaysia, overwork doesn't just keep people late at the office — it turns them into ghosts. People cancel on friends. They disappear from social life. The campaign took that metaphor and made it literal.

Le Pub and Publicis Groupe developed the creative concept. My job was to make it technically feasible, scope it, manage the vendors, and ensure the experience worked on event night — because event night was the only night that mattered.

The Experience

At No. 5 Emerald Hill, a heritage venue in Singapore, guests submitted photos of friends who had canceled due to work commitments. AI technology — combining facial analysis, video generation, and text-to-speech — transformed those photos into personalized video content. The absent friends appeared to speak, delivering messages as though they were present.

Those videos were projected onto a fog wall. The effect was arresting: ghost-like apparitions floating in mist, visible from across the bar, blending the boundary between the absent and the present. It was technically precise — the projection had to hit the fog at the right density, the right angle, with the right luminance to read as a figure rather than a smear of light — and emotionally immediate. People saw their friends appear and reacted before they could analyze the technology.

Technical Execution

The pipeline ran in real time during the event: photo submission, AI processing, video generation, text-to-speech synthesis, and fog-wall projection. Each step had to complete within minutes, not hours, because the experience lived inside a single evening. There was no queue anyone would wait in. The gap between "I uploaded my friend's photo" and "my friend is speaking to me from a wall of fog" had to feel seamless.

Zero margin for error. One event night. The projection system, the AI pipeline, and the venue infrastructure all had to hold simultaneously. They did.

The activation ran under the Heineken brand with Le Pub and collaborators Sergey Mast and Tammy Tan. It landed — technically clean, emotionally resonant, and complete on the night it needed to be complete.