Episode 135 - Samsung #Flipvertising Case Study Reviewed by heycar UK and Bian Salins Consulting
Gen Z consumers don’t like ads. So Samsung Electronics decided to trick them into “gaming the algorithm” and… chasing after their #Flipvertising content to win a phone.
In this week’s #AdvertisingWatchingAds, we review a brilliant but complicated Australian campaign chosen by Contagious. Did this initiative actually yield the sales uplift they claim? Can they trace the benefits back to the original marketing strategy? And would you crawl the internet for clues for a free smartphone?
Watch the episode to see the ad, hear from our guests Charlotte Ford (Head of Brand Marketing & Engagement at heycar UK) and Bian Salins (CEO of Bian Salins Consulting), and let us know what you think!
Episode 135 - Samsung #Flipvertising Case Study Reviewed by heycar UK and Bian Salins Consulting
Transcript is automatically generated, so not perfect, but you get the idea!
Tom Ollerton 0:00
Hello and welcome to Advertisers Watching Ads. This is a weekly show where brands watch other brands' ads..
Tom Ollerton 0:28
My name is Tom Ollerton, I'm the founder of Automated Creative. And we are brought to you, as ever by our lovely partners, Contagious, who helped source the ad this week. Before we get to this week's ad, let's meet this week's guests.
Charlotte Ford 0:41
I'm Charlotte Ford. I'm Head of Brand Marketing and Engagement for heycar UK, which is an online car marketplace.
Bian Salins 0:47
Hi, I'm Bian Salins, and I run my own consulting company, Bian Salins Consulting. But I'm working at Lumon Pay, which is a currency, foreign currency exchange experts.
Tom Ollerton 0:58
Right. Fantastic. I, as ever, have very high expectations of your critique in this week's ad. Let's have a look.
Tom Ollerton 1:08
How good do you think this is? One, two, three...
Bian Salins 3:17
I think it's a three for me.
Charlotte Ford 3:18
Yeah.
Charlotte Ford 3:19
This makes me very stressed because I can only imagine what the account management team that went through to get this live. It is brilliant, but it's very complicated.
Bian Salins 3:30
User-generated content has obviously worked before, like Coke share Coke, for example. This was Australia only from what I understand. I found it a little bit too complex if they had taken this into a worldwide... I certainly didn't get it at first point, but it was a clever use of Google. That's what I would say.
Charlotte Ford 3:50
It's asking quite a lot of the user to go sit through hours of content and hope that they'll get the right clues to find the right search terms to get to their phone. I think 34% in sales. That's a great stat. How are you measuring that? How is that being attributed when... What's your time frame that you're measuring that? It's tricky to attribute that entirely to sales. So I would love to know how they did that. The sales data is probably the strongest one, but is the one that's hardest to back up unless they actually release their own data.
Bian Salins 4:20
The thing that I liked about it, and I'd love to get your perspective, is they have realized that Gen-Z want to be marketed to in a different way. They don't want. They value their privacy. They don't want to be advertised to in the way we know advertising, and they've tried to play very much into that insight from that audience. So I want to give them credit for like thinking about new ways of marketing to an audience that everybody's trying to figure out.
Charlotte Ford 4:49
Gen Z want to be marketed to in a different way. I think that's a really strong insight and actually that's more compelling than saying they don't like advertising. It's not that they're not receptive to advertising it's just they want to be advertised to in a different way. I mean, we talk a lot about Gen Z not consuming TV or linear TV anymore, and actually, Channel 4 did some research a few months ago around Gen Z, just for the UK, but it talked about Gen Z watch 5 hours of content a day. And it's not all short form, you know, six-second bumpers on YouTube. It's long, long form. So they definitely do watch content. They definitely are being advertised to. It's just in different spaces. And that's why I think companies like Samsung need to go out and find those spaces in order to actually market to them, which is I think what they've done very well with this.
Bian Salins 5:39
I type in Samsung Galaxy, whatever... I get to see like tons of other people's content. But because I've interacted with that, I'm then put into a retargeting pool and then I get sold an ad that says, you, you're close to unlocking, you know, whatever the first, the first clip. So that's how, that's how it worked effectively from my perspective. And I mean in a way I guess really exposing unbranded content was a clever way of getting your brand equity through social proof. Ultimately, I think the role of marketing and advertising is not just to create that initial spike, but to sustain it and create memorability and to be able to create long term, you know, sustainable revenue and brand equity. And I would love to know like, you know, six to 12 months on, are they still seeing, you know, the benefits of that kind of brand advertising.
Charlotte Ford 6:37
I think also people are used to having smartphones now and they're used to having the latest tech, and that starts much earlier in life than it did for, you know, older generation. So I think I'm slightly worried about my four-year-old eyeing out my iPhone the other day, but we have to, have that battle. But I think that's the thing. People are more used to having high quality tech and carrying around in their pocket than perhaps we, we are. And maybe that's why they've gone after this generation and it's so directly targeted against iPhone users. Who knows?
Tom Ollerton 7:10
What would constitute success to you in terms of numbers for a massive challenger like Samsung?
Bian Salins 7:16
Sometimes it's also about the investment you've put in to it. If they put in a low level of investment, which seems like they indicating and they've got that kind of return in terms of sales and I would say longevity because most brands that I've worked at when they've done their short term spikes, but they haven't been, it's like a spike of hope. And then there's a flat line of no. Effectively, you get questioned by the business around, what is the actual ROI of marketing? What is the purpose of this campaign? And then you don't get the investment for the next time. So for me, it's about sustainable success and know, making sure you're getting the ROI on what you're investing in.
Charlotte Ford 7:59
I've actually just done a competition in partnership with a retailer where we gave the car away to their database. Now, my objective for that was pretty cold blooded in that I really wanted to accrue heycar's email database. And we did. We ended up tripling it in two months. And that's where it's like, "Okay, that made sense. That's the return on investment." That was pretty good because we just gave away a car. We didn't have to pay for anything else. I think something like this, it does look fairly reasonably cheap to execute. I think you've got influencer fees, things like that, and the cost of the campaign with Google, but ultimately they're giving away their own product. So that's the kind of, it's not like they're spending millions on TV. I can imagine they spent millions on TV as well. So I think that's the point around. What was your return on investment on this specific campaign? And then actually what did it deliver? Because if that campaign did the 34% uplift in sales... That's pretty impressive.
Tom Ollerton 8:56
Well, unfortunately, we're at the end of the show. Would you sign off this campaign? Would you sign it off in its current form? Yes or no? Thumbs up? One, two, three...
Bian Salins 9:05
Yeah. I'd sign it. I think I'd sign it off.
Tom Ollerton 9:12
Well, look, thank you so much for joining the show today, guys. We will see you all next.
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