DBS Live Fresh recreated Singapore's legendary Zouk nightclub inside Fortnite Creative Mode in 2020, turning pandemic-era lockdown into a millennial gaming and
DBS Live Fresh Brings Zouk Back to Life Inside Fortnite
The DBS Live Fresh "Fortnite x Live Fresh" campaign is a September 2020 Singapore digital activation that recreated the legendary Zouk nightclub at Jiak Kim Street inside Fortnite Creative Mode, allowing millennials to relive a beloved venue while the COVID-19 pandemic kept Singapore's nightlife shuttered.
DBS Live Fresh is a credit card designed for Singapore millennials, offering cashback rewards on nightlife and lifestyle spending. When the pandemic closed the very experiences the card was built to reward, The Secret Little Agency (TSLA) identified an alternative arena where that audience was already spending their time: gaming. The resulting activation, published in Singapore in September 2020 and reported on by The Drum as launching on September 3, 2020, inserted the DBS Live Fresh brand directly into Fortnite Creative Mode, one of the most widely played digital environments of its era. Campaign Asia reported the activation was live from September 1, 2020, with the Fortnite Creative Mode access code 9335-6787-4501 published by DBS to allow players to enter the reconstructed venue directly.
The campaign's central mechanic was the recreation of Zouk at Jiak Kim Street — a club that closed in 2016 and relocated to Clarke Quay — with fidelity drawn from archival footage, architectural blueprints, and community memory. Players entering the Live Fresh Club could dance on a virtual dance floor, battle for fresh coins, or simply navigate a faithful reproduction of a space that held deep cultural significance for Singaporeans. The campaign sits at the intersection of the finance and gaming industries, positioning a cashback credit card not through conventional rate comparisons or rewards charts, but through an emotionally resonant, participatory experience built inside a game. The Clapboard Score for this campaign is 69 out of 100, reflecting its creative ambition and cultural specificity within the Singapore market.
DBS Live Fresh targeted Singapore millennials with a product promise built around fresh, rewarding nightlife experiences. That promise became commercially incoherent in 2020 when Singapore's COVID-19 safe distancing measures suspended nightlife operations, removing the very spending category the card incentivised. TSLA's strategic response was to relocate the brand's experiential promise into a space that remained fully operational: online gaming.
Fortnite provided the platform for this pivot because its Creative Mode allowed bespoke world-building, and because its player base skewed toward exactly the demographic DBS Live Fresh served. The decision to reconstruct Zouk at Jiak Kim Street, rather than invent a generic virtual club, was strategically precise. As reported by Campaign Asia, the activation was designed to address pent-up demand and nostalgia for live entertainment during COVID-19 nightlife closures, anchoring the brand to genuine emotional memory rather than manufactured aspiration.
In the Singapore credit card market, DBS Live Fresh competed directly against lifestyle and cashback products from established rivals including OCBC and Citibank Singapore. According to Blog Seedly Sg, DBS Live Fresh offered up to five percent cashback on eligible online and contactless spending, with a minimum monthly spend requirement of approximately S$600 and defined monthly cashback caps — a competitive structure that required the card to win on experience and identity rather than rate alone. By embedding the brand inside a cultural moment that competitors did not occupy, the campaign created a differentiation that a rate table could not replicate. The finance campaign also demonstrated that a digital marketing strategy built around gaming could carry genuine brand equity for a financial product in the Singapore market, not merely drive short-term engagement.
The Secret Little Agency approached the creative execution as an act of cultural preservation as much as advertising. The brief was reconstruction: to rebuild Zouk at Jiak Kim Street inside Fortnite Creative Mode with enough accuracy that Singaporeans who had danced, argued, and celebrated there would recognise it. According to dbs.com, the team used archival footage, architectural blueprints, and collected memories to inform every detail of the build, including the toilets, main bar, foyer, and dance floor — spaces that, as reported by Campaign Asia and corroborated by NME, were reproduced down to their spatial character and atmosphere.
Creative Director Etienne Lesourd of TSLA framed the ambition directly, stating: "We know the world is crying out for the day we can attend music festivals or visit our favourite clubs again." He added that "in Asia, no club is missed more than the legendary one that used to sit along the banks of the Singapore River at Jiak Kim Street." Those statements define the creative register the execution held throughout: it was an exercise in longing made playable, not a product demonstration dressed in gaming aesthetics.
The use of archival footage as a source material for a real-time 3D environment was a technically and editorially demanding choice. It required translating two-dimensional documentary evidence into navigable three-dimensional space, maintaining fidelity to a venue that no longer existed in its original form. Bee Bee Lim, Executive Director and Head of Customer Marketing at DBS, indicated that the brand wanted to bring people together during a period of enforced separation, a goal that shaped the interactive mechanics — the dance floor, the coin battles, and the open exploration — that gave the Live Fresh Club its participatory quality. The campaign comprised two media assets and was submitted to the archive by Creative Director Etienne Lesourd of TSLA.
The Live Fresh Club case study, published internally under the title "LIVE FRESH CLUB CASE STUDY" in 2021, recorded a view count of 2,206 on its archived case study video, with three recorded likes, according to data documented by clapboard.com. These figures reflect archival engagement with the case study asset rather than campaign-wide reach metrics, and no verified third-party performance data — including card acquisition numbers, in-game session volumes, or earned media reach — is publicly available for the full campaign from a named independent source.
Structurally, the campaign demonstrated effectiveness across several dimensions that are analytically relevant regardless of declared metrics. It generated coverage across multiple international and regional publications, including The Drum, NME, Campaign Asia, and Mixmag Asia, indicating that a finance campaign built around a Singapore gaming activation achieved earned media reach beyond the domestic market. NME's coverage in particular placed a Singapore credit card campaign in front of a global music and culture audience — an unusual distribution pathway for a banking product.
The campaign's structural strength lies in its specificity. By anchoring the activation to a real, named, geographically precise venue — Zouk at Jiak Kim Street — rather than a generic virtual space, DBS Live Fresh created a cultural reference point with pre-existing emotional valence in Singapore. That specificity made the campaign more memorable and more shareable than a generic branded Fortnite experience would have been. The Clapboard Score of 69 out of 100 reflects this balance: strong creative rationale and cultural intelligence, with limited publicly verifiable performance data to confirm conversion impact.
The DBS Live Fresh Fortnite campaign is a September 2020 Singapore digital activation created by The Secret Little Agency. It recreated the original Zouk nightclub at Jiak Kim Street inside Fortnite Creative Mode, allowing players to explore the iconic venue during COVID-19 nightlife closures via access code 9335-6787-4501.
DBS Live Fresh built its brand promise around nightlife cashback rewards for Singapore millennials. When COVID-19 closed nightlife venues in 2020, the brand moved its experiential promise into gaming. Fortnite's Creative Mode allowed TSLA to build a bespoke virtual environment where the target audience was already spending significant time.
The Secret Little Agency, known as TSLA, created the campaign for DBS Live Fresh in Singapore. Creative Director Etienne Lesourd led the work, using archival footage and architectural blueprints to reconstruct Zouk at Jiak Kim Street inside Fortnite with documented spatial accuracy.
Zouk at Jiak Kim Street closed in 2016 and relocated to Clarke Quay, making it a venue Singaporeans remembered but could no longer visit. As reported by Campaign Asia, the activation was designed to tap pent-up nostalgia for live entertainment, giving the DBS Live Fresh brand an emotionally resonant cultural anchor.
The DBS Live Fresh Fortnite x Live Fresh campaign received a Clapboard Score of 69 out of 100. The score reflects the campaign's strong creative rationale and cultural specificity within the Singapore market, alongside the limited publicly verifiable performance data available from independent named sources.
Competitors including OCBC and Citibank Singapore competed primarily on cashback rates and rewards structures in the Singapore credit card market. DBS Live Fresh instead built brand differentiation through a participatory cultural experience inside Fortnite, occupying an emotional and experiential space that no comparable Singapore finance campaign held in 2020.
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