Background:

Arguably the biggest commerce event in the calendar. Generating $33.9bn in sales worldwide, an estimated $3.8bn in AU, Black Friday is a revered sales moment each year for Samsung … along with a plethora of other brands.

Black Friday’s widespread popularity and expectations of increased spending over the period, has created a market that is swamped with brands competing for attention.

For many consumers and brands alike, Black Friday has become overwhelming. Consumer inboxes are bombarded with deals from every brand they’ve ever dealt with, looked at, or accidentally visited. And with soo much competition, Samsung was losing out to other brands and retailers over this period.

The Brief:

How do we create standout for Samsung in the ocean of deals customers are offered on Black Friday?

Objectives:

Deliver 1.7x YoY growth in online traffic and sales via Samsung.com.

Grow Samsung’s first party database by gaining 17,000 Auction registrations.

We flipped Black Friday eCommerce on its head by introducing The Reverse Auction. A new online sales mechanic, where Samsung gave customers the power to decide the price they’d pay for its most popular products.

Unlike a regular auction, each Reverse Auction started with products listed at full recommended retail price (RRP). These prices would then drop back in increments until all items in the auctions had been bid for, or the price reached $1 – whichever happened first.

Launched via a series of social films that showcased the Reverse Auction as breaking news, people were directed to register their details via a website experience that offered a range of Samsung products up for grabs. People who engaged with the campaign were then targeted with a series of offer specific performance media and creative relevant to their interests driving revenue through Samsung’s online store.

Black Friday is not only the biggest and busiest retail moment of the year, from a media perspective, it’s also the most expensive - in 2021, Samsung’s CPMs were 400% higher than average. To address the challenge of standout amidst an ocean of deals, we needed to shift from a purely transactional approach. Simply increasing investment in sales messaging was not going to deliver results.

This shift had to be carefully balanced against delivering commercial value through sales conversions via a well-crafted performance component to the campaign.

To achieve this, we developed a two-part strategy.

1) Drive Fame: by building hype around Samsung’s Black Friday sale by giving shoppers an unexpected, novel, emotive retail experience through the Reverse Auction.

2) Drive traffic: Harness buzz and leads generated by Reverse Auction through retargeting and showcase the breadth of Samsung products on sale during the period.

We launched The Reverse Auction via a series of social films, leveraging high-impact digital media placements to raise awareness. We also delivered eDM activity to Samsung’s database to further drive awareness of the Reverse Auctions.

Lead generation was an important objective to build Samsung’s database and continue communications with customers that engaged over the sales period.

The Reverse Auction website was a complex digital build created to host the auction experience, boasting data capture capabilities, dynamic content and live bidding technology for large volumes of users. It provided a frictionless mechanic for (over 50,000!!) customers to register, delivering a compelling incentive for users to provide their data in exchange for a chance to take part in the auctions.

We ran 20 Reverse Auctions over the campaign, auctioning 60 Samsung products valued at $140,000 RRP. The Auctions attracted over 80,000 bidders and customers unlocked brilliant deals over the period.

The 2022 Black Friday campaign was Samsung’s most effective ever - setting new records for marketing effectiveness and efficiency. The campaign delivered significant business impact both in terms of reach, sales and data acquisition and retention. Together we delivered:

- Delivered 120% vs. target for site traffic, 285% YoY

- 270% YoY increase in Black Friday sales revenue

- Improved ROAS by 197% YoY (+97% vs target)

- +300% registrations vs target, that’s 51,512 people registered!

- $1.3m worth of first party data captured

- 234,204 Reverse Auction site sessions

- 80,000+ live bidders in our Auction sessions

We blew 2021 Black Friday out of the water and delivered a MROI of 360%