The Campaign

We'll take care of you, wherever you are. The campaign tells the story of a Samsung engineer who travels great distances in his Samsung Service Van to help Samsung customers in remote parts of India. In the film we see Amit, a Samsung engineer, promise a young customer that he will make it to her home by 7pm to fix her TV. He spends the day covering miles of mountainous terrain, crossing rivers, clearing roadblocks, even shooing away sheep to keep his promise. Only to discover a dramatic fact about her. And why she wanted the TV to be fixed before 7 PM. Amit's troubles were well worth it because Samsung believes that great distances must be travelled for the sake of relationships sometimes. The press ads played a supporting role with a shot of Amit asking for directions from a village kid.

Creative Execution

The campaign started with press ads and articles lucidly announcing the launch of this first-of-its-kind service. Vernacular publications were given as much importance as the English press. The idea was to penetrate as deep into India as these vans can go. This was followed by the launch of the film on December 30, 2016. Major TV channels aired the film during the long holiday weekend maximising the impact. The online video was also uploaded simultaneously on YouTube. Since it was a holiday weekend we correctly concluded that music, Bollywood, entertainment and dance would be hot topics for search on YouTube. 8 such clusters were identified to target the film to. These were further scaled down to 4 to go deeper into our target audience. Continuous honing of our strategy and the quality of our creative ensured that every cent we spent went twice as far as the average.

Results

• 101M views, 90K shares,110K likes • Most watched online video in India • World’s 3rd most watched online video • Best completion rate worldwide • 4 times more organic views than the global average • Calls to the Samsung Customer Care number went up by 49% in one month • Samsung Service Vans have covered almost than two million kilometres attending to Samsung customers across India The film got an astounding 10 million views in just 3 days. 20 million in a week, 40 million in 16 days and a 100 million in 53 days. Making it the fastest ever commercial to reach a hundred million views. A world record! More than 65 news outlets including The Times of India, NDTV, CNBC, Forbes, Dainik Jagran, The Economic Times, Outlook, Mashable, The Financial Express, CNET, 9gag, Business Standard and Refinery29 have spoken about the campaign already.

In 2016, Samsung launched fully equipped mobile service vans to provide doorstep service to the remotest parts of India. However, Indians have become wary of service promises thanks to the apathetic delivery by consumer-durable manufacturers. Therefore, we had to engage with the customer on a one-to-one level via compelling creative and intelligent targeting to convince them to call our Customer Care Number and avail this facility. The film crossed 100M views to become the most watched online video in India and calls to the Samsung helpline increased by 49%. Samsung Vans have covered more than 200,000 km across India since.

Samsung touches almost every family in India. All of them had to be told about our new service initiative. That makes for a very large base to talk to. Seen in this light our budgets were limited . So, we decided to target influencers via creative that was high on virality and impact. The audience was 20-29, male and female. These young Indians are less tolerant of traditional Indian laxity and expect brands to be like them- professional/hardworking/caring. They are easily bored by dry, feature based, hard sell. Thanks to ubiquitous and cheap data they are true blue digital natives - consuming rich data throughout their day. A compelling and emotional film was thus produced. It showed not just a mere number to call but also the trouble that a Samsung engineer will go through to service a customer. Once the film went viral, press and PR did the rest.