Duane Kennedy and Denis Werner are founding partners of Dai Biao Holdings, a Shanghai-based company that is using Generation Y lifestyle trends, such as hip hop, action sports, and street fashions, to market goods and services in China. Dai Biao also has plans in place to open boutique hotels, restaurants and nightclubs.
Both men arrived in China two years ago, and have backgrounds in financial analysis and music marketing. Born in Detroit, Werner spent 11 years in the US army, followed by a stint working for Bear Stearns. Before moving to China, he worked as a marketing specialist for live music events in New York. LA-born Kennedy managed his own financial brokerage before setting up Ubiquitous Entertainment, which produced hip-hop soundtracks for major Hollywood movie studios and independent filmmakers.
How did the idea for Dai Biao begin?
DK: Three years ago, when I first came to China, the founding idea for Dai-Biao.com was to create an online portal for the growing community of hip-hop fans in China. I saw there were a lot of grass roots events, and that the Generation Y movement was growing, but there was little access to get content, information and products here. The scene had built up from Korean and Japanese hip hop, which was rather watered down, and I could see Chinese Gen Yers wanted the real deal from the US and Europe.
DW: I was looking at things slightly differently to Duane. Whereas he was focused on the music download and multimedia side, I was looking at the live music, events and entertainment angles, particularly for hip hop and electronic music, but we realised that all these aspects fitted perfectly together.
How has the idea developed since then?
DW: The scope has just got so much bigger. China’s Gen Y is evolving and growing, and hip hop is only a subset – you’ve also got things like action sports, street fashions, dance and the punk movement. But we still see the mashing together of hip hop with other musical styles, and this forms a key part of the Gen Y lifestyle.
DK: In the US, hip hop developed in the urban centres and grew out to the suburbs. Here in China, kids are going onto the Internet and seeing it as a whole – not about politics, or black and white, but about the Gen Y lifestyle package. So this led us to look more closely at merchandising of everything associated with the entire lifestyle, from street gear to high-end ‘bling’ clothing.
Tell us more about the website?
DK: Dai Biao means “represent” in Chinese, and also “leadership,” so we aim to represent and lead the Gen Y generation. Dai-Biao.com will be a full destination centre, with music and video downloads – and because we have done deals with music labels, all of the music on there is 100 per cent legal. There’s also a community space, where people can upload heir own profiles, blogs, music and videos to represent who they are to their community. It was launched on 23 July, and we are still building new streams and channels, but will start some viral marketing in universities later this year to promote it. We are partnering with a lot of content providers, as well as potential sponsors to create content.
DW: Later this year, we will also be streaming Dai-Biao TV with live web casts, podcasting and broadcast content through PP Live, China’s largest peer-to-peer Internet TV portal with some 75 million users. All content, and we are producing some of it ourselves, will be branded with Dai-Biao.com to drive users to our site, and ultimately, this TV content will be streamed on our site as well. We also have deals in place with Hunan and Guangdong TV.
What other projects are you involved in?
DW: On the venue side, we have a portfolio planned. Motor will be a hip-hop and live music club, which we hope to launch in Shanghai this
Fall, and Pipeline is a reasonably priced American-style skater restaurant. These both cater for younger Gen Y markets. For the bling
end, we will launch Melange, a high-end dance club, and Panache is a high-end dining concept. We want to roll out venues across China, in
the "Ferrari 10" – the ten cities where Ferrari has located its showrooms. These are Shanghai, Beijing, Xiamen, Hangzhou, Shenzhen,
Guangzhou, Chengdu, Chongqing, Dalian and Qingdao.
DK: We have also had a USD650m deal accepted for Riverwalk Complex in Singapore, where we will develop Avalon Singapore, a high-end development consisting of 30 residential units, 200 luxury hotel rooms and a suite of restaurants, including Panache upscale dining, a lounge and nightclub, fitness centre and spa, tattoo and body piercing centre. We see Singapore as a great place to launch Avalon, as it has new super casinos coming, as well as the F1 Grand Prix. It is going to be the Monte Carlo of Asia.
DK: The financing for Avalon Singapore was arranged through Euroventure out of Vienna, and is the first of eight Avalon developments we plan to open around the world, with the next one most likely to be in Dubai. We are using different financiers for different projects, and are always looking to raise new funds for new projects.
How will you use Dai-Biao.com for marketing products and brands?
DK: We’ve not yet been aggressive in partnering for the website. At present, we are focused on cataloguing data from those who are joining the Dai Biao community – everything from what brand of athletics shoes they wear to their favourite soft drinks and clothing lines. When the time is right, we will then aggressively court multinational companies that are looking to access China’s Gen Y consumers.
DW: We also have licensed the Asian rights to MOBIQA, a barcode technology used on the London metro. It has so many applications. For example, we could run a discount campaign for a jeans manufacturer and send the discount vouchers via barcode to users’ mobile phones. That way, we have the Dai Biao code, the user’s code and the campaign code, so we’ll know all about those who redeem the vouchers. This helps partners to zero right in on their targeted markets, which may be, for example, 16-year-olds in Guangzhou who wear Levis. We’ll have all that data for segmenting markets and tracking the success of campaigns.
Last update : Thursday, 16 August 2007
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