Chinese New Year is the most important time for brands to connect with consumers and demonstrate cultural resonance. However, with every brand investing heavily, it’s critical to be ownable and stand out. For the past two years, BMW has relied on a winning formula: playing with its name in an irreverent way to bring Joy to consumers. In 2021, we hilariously turned BMW into Ba Ma Wo, which means ‘dad, mom and me’. In 2022, we created an interplay between a horse (BMW’s Chinese name “Precious Horse”) with a tiger (2022, the year of Tiger) that got everyone singing and dancing. This year the brief was to continue the “BMW way of celebrating CNY” – timely, joyful and something only BMW can do. So we turned to the topic that everyone was talking about – AI. And we showed how an AI-fail allowed BMW to accidentally hijack Chinese New Year.

In Chinese culture, people love to send each other wishes full of auspicious words rich in meaning. One of the most popular words, common in CNY wishes and ancient poems, is ‘Bao Ma’. Bao (“Precious”) indicates rich and rare, while Ma (“Horse”) indicates ranking and progression. Well, Bao Ma also happens to be BMW’s Chinese name. BMW chose Bao Ma because of its deep cultural meaning. But a funny thing happens when we ask AI what Bao Ma means. Rather than a Precious Horse with deep roots in Chinese culture, AI describes Bao Ma as a luxury car brand from Germany! We boldly turned this AI error into BMW’s 2023 CNY campaign theme: “Translating Joy”.

This social campaign targeted Chinese GenZ, who are the most culturally proud and most likely to engage with brands that they love. We launched the video on the social media platform Bilibili. Bilibili is the ultimate gathering spot for youth culture, with 152.5 million monthly active users, 78% of which are millennials and GenZ. The campaign was then amplified on all social channels and offline touchpoints. But rather than just re-posting the video, we created dedicated activations that reflected the natural user behaviors of each platform.

The campaign launched on Bilibili with a viral video featuring funny translations that connected good wishes contained Bao Ma and BMW. The video ended with a catch phrase “Lucky Money into BMW to Success” (original Chinese meanings: wish you fortune and success). The video was launched on Jan 19th, two days before CNY eve, when everyone starts to send each other New Year wishes. In the next two days, the video was amplified across different touchpoints: on Wechat, where brand fans gather, BMW released exclusive digital red packets, memes and CNY posters that said “Lucky Money into BMW into Success”. On China’s Tiktok, 80+ dealerships participated in a “Lucky Money into BMW to Success” dance challenge. On lifestyle platforms Weibo and RED, we released themed merchandise. And offline, dealerships gave away exclusive gift boxes containing “Lucky Money into BMW to Success” posters, BAVA bears and red packets.

The “Translating Joy” campaign was even more influential than 2022’s hugely successful BMW CNY campaign “Nothing but Sheer Joy” and once again made BMW the most iconic and culturally resonant brand during CNY.

• Campaign impressions: 976M


• Campaign video views: 263M, +2% vs. 2022;


• Campaign engagement: 10.4M, which is 2.6 times than 2022 CNY campaign engagement;


• More than 80 dealers participated the campaign and created +37.9%;
 greater impact on their fans

• NSR reached a new high of 98.2%, which is almost 10% higher than 2022.



Many fans used translation apps to validate the AI error during CNY. The phenomena grew to be so big that the tech giants who own the translation apps finally corrected the error.