Samsung wanted to move from being a respected brand to a loved one. We saw April Fools’ Day, a day dedicated to practical jokes, as the perfect platform to do this; It would allow Samsung to challenge other brands that utilise this light-hearted day, while also letting them showcase their creativity, innovation and humour.

On the 1st of April 2014, Samsung launched the world’s first free Wi-Fi service powered by pigeons and the new Samsung micro router; it was called Samsung Fli-Fy.

This new venture was announced through the Samsung social channels as a test pilot event in London that would eventually go on to supply free Wi-Fi connectivity to the entire country and in doing so, replace the unstable, weak and frustrating W-Fi experience that we know and expect.

Samsung’s Fli-Fy really took off. In a single day it received 50,000 YouTube views and was included on the top content lists of the April Fools’ Day. It featured in national and international press and, most importantly, delivered 1000% ROI on £50k - delivering £500k in PR value.

From pub to publish we had a week to produce content and execute. We understood that the more Samsung owned feeds and channels that were optimised with the Fli-Fy content, the more likely to be shared outside our channels and affect the wider media.

We knew that we could not rely solely on the video content and would have to generate additional content to support our story. To lend the campaign credibility we published a full project scope on our dotcom site.

Understanding that media titles would be scraping the web for the best examples of April Fool’s content during the day we updated all channels throughout the day with updates and responses to our announcement.

PR was focused towards tech and lifestyle publications, variants of the story dependent on title. Our success was due to the detail of our execution from day one. We knew we had a one day window to create noise and we did everything in our power to ensure we were louder than the rest.

From all accounts the Fly-Fi campaign was a great success. The activity reached 23 million people worldwide and earned 43 mentions across both local and International media in one day. The Fly-Fi video seeded onto the Samsung Youtube channel received 84,000 views in the first 3 days with 50,000 in the first 24 hours. We had one of the highest visit and share rates of a Samsung.com Discover blog, with 20% of all Samsung.com traffic on April 1st being Fly-Fi related.

Across social media channels we also reached 1.5 million people and had a myriad of positive comments from our followers and other tech enthusiasts praising Samsung for their great April fool’s idea. All in all, with a campaign spend of under £50,000 and a generated PR value of over £500,000, we were able to deliver in excess of a 1000% ROI for the client and developed something that we, as an agency, are immensely proud of. We also got an intimate education about Pigeons and saw first-hand how impressive lady Penelope and her kit really are.