The Campaign

Branded entertainment is becoming hugely important in Australia, as viewing habits drift away from TV and towards online and streamed content. Our target was young-minded smartphone owners who are early to mid adopters of technology. They’re heavy users of online media, which constantly exposes them to remarkable content and amazing technology every day. We needed to be disruptive enough to stand out, while convincing them that this device was something they genuinely wanted.

Results

Samsung were launching their Gear VR headset in Australia to consumers who were wary of tech gimmicks and fad “innovations”. We needed to prove to them that the Gear VR was a genuine game changer, unlike anything they’d experienced before. We decided that one of the most dramatic ways we could demonstrate the power of a VR experience would be to create as big a gap as possible between the audience’s real world environment, and the environment that they would discover in VR. So we travelled to Port Lincoln, South Australia, and captured a unique, underwater 360-degree film of great white sharks in their natural habitat – including a glimpse of never before seen footage captured right inside the mouth of a great white. This footage was carefully edited, graded and crafted with sound design to create an eerily realistic underwater experience. We then took this immersive film 1200km north, to Alice Springs, Central Australia. To premiere the film we set up a scuba store, despite the fact that the nearest ocean was a 16-hour drive away. When curious locals and tourists popped in to see just what a dive shop was doing in the middle of the desert, we offered them the chance to try out the Gear VR and enter a world that most Australians have never seen – the underwater home of the great white shark.

The live event was promoted to a local audience through flyers, radio announcements, local press, signage and event staff, while the incongruous dive store itself drew foot traffic from curious locals. The film of the event was released on YouTube and Facebook, turning these personal experiences into content built to intrigue, attract and be shared by a wider audience.

Within just a few hours of launch, the film of the event was shared more than 10,000 times, showing this remarkable story was relevant, surprising and something people wanted to share. Over 3000 people commented on the content, with 98% positive sentiment. It's been watched more than 1.8 million times in 194 countries, proving that the content is more than just intriguing. The immersive Shark Dive has toured across Australia, featured on TV shows, product launches and other local events, offering hundreds of Australians the opportunity to dive on dry land, get up close and personal with a great white, and experience the magic of VR for themselves.

The launch of Samsung Gear VR, a virtual reality headset, by creating a ‘dive shop’ in land locked Alice Springs, where customers could come and try a 360-degree shark diving film, which lets users experience the underwater home of great white sharks without even donning a wetsuit. They captured underwater footage of the great whites near Port Lincoln in South Australia, including a 360-degree shot of the inside of a shark’s mouth, captured when it attempted to eat the camera rig. The footage was used to create the immersive film ‘The Dive’ and then established a Dive Shop for Samsung in Alice Springs and invited locals to experience the shark dive using the Samsung device. Their reactions were then recorded and edited into a short video.