It’s impossible to understand why VR is a force for disruption if you’ve never tried it. The idea of immersing yourself into a virtual reality experience is really hard to imagine. The closest you can get on a standard screen is scrolling around a 360-degree video. After you’ve experienced VR firsthand, the possibilities are endlessly exciting. And you want more. More access. More content. As marketers, many of us have seen what VR can do first-hand. This was not true for most people in the U.S.

With our idea, we needed to make VR accessible to the masses. Our thought was, what better way to showcase how VR is transforming the world than by showcasing the very people who are creating and living the early disruption of the technology?

We created a content series, “Beyond the Frame,” filmed on Samsung Gear 360 cameras with edgy content provider VICE, demonstrating VR’s possibilities across multiple storytelling applications.

Viewers followed director Chris Milk, showing how he uses VR as an immersive machine to tell stories through film and video, including natural disasters. We showed how VR changes the way football players train, allowing them to put themselves on the field of gameplay. We joined the USA Men’s National Basketball Team on their road to the Olympics. And worked with The New York Times and The White Helmets, a volunteer group in Aleppo, Syria, showing how VR changes the way news is told, giving viewers an immersive view of the devastation of the war, something no media outlet has done.

An integrated media plan drove views to each episode, viewable in VR, 360 video, on TV and across 2D screens and social media.

Beyond the Frame showed how storytellers and athletes used Samsung devices to innovate their craft. Not only did it get people excited for VR innovation, seeing how the technology could apply to their lives, it delivered brand results for Samsung.

Research showed Samsung’s brand affinity increased 15% among millennials males who experienced the content and their purchase intent for Samsung products increased 21%. Beyond the Frame also generated a 36% increase in familiarity with VR.

On digital, it delivered video views beyond benchmark, more than double the per-episode goal for film one. Video completion rates beat Vice’s benchmark by 7%, with nearly 1/3rd of all viewers completing the episode. Across all episodes, we drove 89 Million impressions, 43% above expected benchmark. Video views also delivered above expectations, as high as +203% for film one. Overall, Beyond the Frame garnered a 13% engagement rate, 6.5x higher than Samsung’s benchmark.