Samsung is great at selling people new Galaxy phones, but it was struggling to build a meaningful post-purchase relationship with its owners. To bring existing Galaxy owners closer to the brand, Samsung launched a loyalty app in 2019 called the “Members” app. Unfortunately, the mobile app sat unopened on millions of phones. We needed to get Galaxy owners to engage with the app and see what it had to offer by developing a unique, highly sharable, and most importantly exclusive brand experience.

Leveraging one of the most anticipated movies of the year, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, we built an unprecedented Star Wars AR experience directly into Samsung’s Members app. Then, with an auto-update of the app, we silently dropped the experience into 50 million Samsung phones – overnight.

The experience, which could’ve only been done with the technology found in Samsung's phones, allowed users to see the iconic Star Wars ships in the sky like never before. To let people know about it, we released one video of the Millennium Falcon arriving at the film’s premiere in LA – and the Internet did the rest.

Each day, a different life-size ship invaded a specific geofenced area across the U.S. according to the actual speed the ships could travel (no hyperdrive allowed) – making this the first AR tour ever launched.

Research revealed that after Samsung Galaxy owners purchased their phones, they felt less proud to own them over time. Separately, the pre-installed Samsung Members app, which serves as a hub for owners to learn more about their phone, the brand, and engage with other users, sat unopened on millions of devices. We needed to build something that would make them proud to be a Galaxy owner, and driving them to the Members app with an exclusive, immersive, and relevant experience was a clear way-in.

We prioritized reaching users within geo-fences around top U.S. cities where both Galaxy owners and Star Wars fans over-indexed. We also used true-to-canon data – the AR ships “traveled” between different geo-fences according to the actual speeds they can travel, based on Star Wars lore. We were required to drive traffic to the experience using an existing media plan, and still drove 243 million impressions.

Within a two-week window before code-freeze, our team defined, designed, and developed the full native experience, which we ultimately delivered to 50 million Samsung owners’ pockets. In addition, we optimized and integrated seven cinema-quality 3D ship models from “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker,” into the app. We rendered the models in real-time on the device, adding environmental lighting, SFX, and ship animations, all powered by the processors inside Samsung devices. Ships paraded across the country to users' phones within seven geo-fenced cities in the US -- a list we determined by leveraging data identifying the regions over-indexing in both Galaxy owners and Star Wars super fans. Users received notifications when ships arrived in their geo-fence (according to a schedule that took into account the actual speeds the ships could travel), so they could point their Galaxy phones to the sky to snap and share their pictures on social.

Tapping into the massive cultural hype around Star Wars and pushing out messaging on owned and paid channels drove significant awareness for the "Members" app by generating a total of 243M impressions. Most importantly, it was a big win for post-purchase engagement among existing Samsung Galaxy owners. The AR experience drove a +31% increase in average daily users on the Members app. The activation also brought new users into the app, driving a +27% increase in new app installs during the period it was live.