The challenge was to sell the S20, Samsung’s most expensive S series phone at a time when excitement around new phone launches was rapidly dwindling. With 100x Space Zoom, the S20 had the best smartphone camera in history.

To launch it in Australia, Samsung had invested heavily in a national media buyout to run global ads. The brief was to support this media plan by generating PR hype. The solution was to make people not just look at Samsung ads, but obsess over them and actively seek them out.

Microcodes. We hid tiny codes in every S20 ad in Australia. No global approvals needed as they were invisible to the naked eye. Each code was a variation of phone – ph0ne, PHoN3, etc. By finding a code and entering it online, anyone could win a phone. But without the 100x Space Zoom camera, people had to get creative. From billboards to banners to TV commercials, no pixel of our ads was unexamined.

We needed to activate new audiences to close the gap between competitors. Yet we knew regardless of media spend or placement, most wouldn’t notice our advertising.

Dormant audiences in particular are 58% less likely to recall. They have ‘switched off’ to flagship advertising, as 61% are driven only by a phone-failure need, not want (Kantar, 2019). Similarly, Samsung flagship advertising is invisible to Apple customers. Only 12% see Samsung as a brand they ‘want’, with likelihood to act on conventional advertising 31% lower than all other audiences (Eclipse, 2017).

Our challenge became finding a new pathway of persuasion that spoke to these competitor ‘Switchers’ and out of market ‘Dormant’ Samsung audiences, without changing global assets.

Over the campaign's 6-week media plan 300+ codes were individually hidden in billboards, newspapers, banners, social posts, television commercials, pre-rolls, sponsored articles and influencer’s social posts across Facebook and Instagram.

First to find the code and enter it online won a phone.

For competition performance we achieved:

•275,000 microsite sessions

•27,000 individual entries

•15 million+ earned media impressions, across 70 publications

We saw spikes of earned promotion by consumers across media channels: hackers rotating their IP addresses to overcome entry limitations, videos on how to get served S20 ads, forum topics firing up in their quest to share tips. If we wanted launch hype, we got it from all angles, and we saw Australia paw over every single ad.

Did competition success translate into uplift for Samsung?

Armed with Microcodes email entry and new phone registrations, we could link a competition entry to a sale.

The results are as follows:

•2,271 units of Microcodes-attributed sales

•$3.49m value of Microcodes-attributed sales (based on ASP of $1,539)

Global benchmarks required a 3:1 revenue ROI meaning incremental sales of 900k. We achieved $3.49m in sales, driving $1.86m incremental gross margin and an ROI of 5:1.