In January of 2012 LG introduced the world’s slimmest television, the 4mm OLED. The objective was to claim OLED and its thinness for LG before the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Nevada.

At the unveiling of the LG OLED at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2,000,000 people had watched the video. YouTube awarded it a Trending Gold Medal and for 1 week it was the No.1 in many viral charts. After 4 weeks the combined view count was 7,000,000. It generated €1,280,000 in earned media, without spending a single euro on media. Viewers endlessly discussed it, hundreds of blogs posted it, spreading and linking the video with the introduction at CES. And LG is now inextricably linked with ‘slim’, ‘OLED’ and ‘television’ in the minds of consumers all over the world.

We leveraged the current popularity of ‘Dumb thief’, ‘Smart thief’ virals and created our own thief storyline. Our smart thief used the incredible thinness of the TV to his advantage, exiting the store with the TV unseen by security cameras. We chose not to hide that it was an ad, instead placing the brand moment as a subtle wink at the end of the film. Working with a small budget meant there were no funds for seeding the film. We instead chose to place the film on a handful of sites that would be most interested in the work.

The insight for this promotion was that the orientation and decision making of a television purchase is still a predominantly male affair. These consumers get their information mostly from the Internet, tastemakers and friends. In addition, men like a certain type of funny videos and enjoy sharing them online. This lead to the strategic choice of activating the world’s slimmest television through an Internet viral.