The Campaign

Ten years into the smartphone revolution, the truth about our phones is that we no longer value them purely for their design, size or brand name. Instead, the most important quality about our phones is that we use them to express our experiences and our emotions. Those who had bought into the Samsung Galaxy experience had already shown their preference for the simple joy of self-expression over hype. How could we remind them of this? Our idea: We use emojis on our phone to bring the way we communicate to life. So, to demonstrate that Samsung Galaxy phones bring the way we express ourselves and the way we communicate to life, we literally brought emojis to life. The Samsung Galaxy Emojis Alive campaign saw Samsung partner with Uber to deliver real-life emojis to Samsung Galaxy Owners across Australia, thanking them simply for being a Samsung customer. 

Creative Execution

Samsung Galaxy owners in major cities across Australia had access to a private vehicle view within the Uber app which allowed them to request emojis on-demand rather than a vehicle. When they did, we delivered them emojis made real – in the form of fun emoji shaped gifts, delivered by life-size emojis. On the day of activation, thousands of gifts were delivered across Sydney, Melbourne, Perth and Brisbane, with Samsung customers receiving everything from hand-crafted meringues shaped like the Poo emoji, to Gift emojis that included Samsung tablets, smartwatches and headphones. The “delivery moment” was our social set-piece. A simple hashtag, #GalaxyEmojisAlive, was featured on thousands of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter posts, shared organically by recipients of the gifts. As the activation continued, this spread of social activity snowballed into a critical mass of engagement, with many of our promotional gifts running out within hours.

Results

The #GalaxyEmojisAlive campaign delivered unprecedented engagement for both Samsung and Uber, with over 30% of recipients who engaged with the campaign via the Uber app, sharing their experience on social using the campaign hashtag. The hashtag #GalaxyEmojisAlive trended organically on Twitter within hours of the activation, with the reach extending to 1 million Australians via Facebook alone. Of this, 80% of sentiment was positive. Brand tracking revealed that: •73% of the critical 16-29 year olds believed that the campaign made Samsung unique, an 11 point increase from the benchmark. •74% feel curious about the brand, with an additional increase in the belief that Samsung is a dynamic, youthful and distinctive. • 60% of the core said that they would “tell others about Samsung”, an 11% increase in advocacy measures. In short, this highly-targeted direct campaign used real-time activation, available only to Galaxy users, to drive significant movement in brand sentiment.

The widely-held belief is that to improve brand sentiment measures, you need mass-broadcast campaigns that talk to the many. In this campaign for Samsung’s Galaxy series of phones, we made significant improvement to brand sentiment through an activation that was delivered only to Galaxy users, on their Galaxy devices. And when we say the activation was delivered, we mean literally delivered. In an Uber. To individual Samsung users. What started as a brand-to-one experience exploded on social, with Galaxy users becoming brand advocates who dominated social conversation. The end result: significant improvements in brand sentiment amongst Galaxy users.

Our target audience was existing Samsung Galaxy users. Our aim was to keep them in a family by building greater brand affinity, reminding them why they loved their devices in the first place, and in doing so, increasing their tendency to remain in the Galaxy family at the next upgrade cycle. We asked ourselves: was it possible to deliver compelling brand-to-one experiences to Samsung Galaxy users – and only Samsung Galaxy users, so that they could feel a personal human connection with the brand? Through a ride option in the Uber app, we were able to make our activation available exclusively to Samsung Galaxy owners, who could order visits from real-life emojis (and receive emoji-themed gifts) while their friends with competitor phones looked on in envy. Word of the campaign was initiated through simple social posts, media coverage and video, while user-generated social activity gave it critical mass once underway.