making chips and processors exciting & famous

MAKING MEMORY MATTER by filling the inert with life

While Samsung makes incredible phones, tech for the home and beautiful TVs, they have also been fast expanding their processor and memory business.

Yet they weren't famous for that. And let's face it, for good reason. Most people don't know - or care - about processors and hard drives.

Samsung challenged us to make their portable hard drives (PSSDs) and cutting-edge processor famous. And to make it harder, it needed to be famous with young, disinterested Chinese and Koreans. So much so, that they'd happily pay more for a Samsung hard drive. 

Their claim to fame? Unprecedented speed, durability, portability, security, capacity, performance and power.

The market was dominated by big tech brands. Each attempting to cut through the informational din with familiar strategies like: price and prestige (superior tech) and praised strength (durability and speed). It felt like the entire category had all settled on more or less the same story, with every brand obsessively glorifying product attributes: speed, durability, capacity, reliability. Additionally, we also had to contend with high brand switching behaviour in the PSSD category.

OUR AUDIENCE

Busy ‘doers’ in their 30s living in China and Korea. They make things happen and want to make sure what’s important to them is always at hand so they’re ready for action. The business plan they crafted, the dog photography project they’re starting, the favourite movie they downloaded on a Sunday, the capturing of their latest adventure, the precious video of their baby’s first steps or the Minecraft city they built. They pour it all into one place. people were not saving files, they were saving slices of their lives. 

And suddenly we were no longer in the business of selling hard drives. We were in the business of memory preservation.

THE INSIGHT

PSSDs don’t hold files, they hold who we are.  They hold our craft, memories and likes - our identity. They contain the stuff of life: big, little, silly, serious, work, family, side hustles, lols. We put so much of ourselves into them they become extensions of our life.

This is the story of how we turned a low interest product into a high return strategy. It’s a reminder that even when no one cares about a product, even when your audience feels a million miles away, strategy's role is to find the interesting and fill the inert with life. Through realising that hard drives don’t just hold files, they hold who we are, we made memory meaningful and made money too.

DECLARING PLAYTIME IS OVER

CREATIVE CIRCLE 1 GOLD, 2 SILVER, 3 BRONZE

EPIC AWARDS GOLD

CLIOS & ANDYS SHORTLIST

Samsung was launching new phones with the Exynos 2200 mobile processor - which features a state-of-the-art mobile graphics processing unit. But how to communicate this in a meaningful way, to the people for whom it mattered most: gamers?

THE ZAG

We repositioned the Samsung Exynos with a punchy pivot, throwing shade at childish mobile games.

We spoke to our gamer audience in a 60-second film that uses the visual language they know and love: ‘The Marketplace’ has the look and feel of a sophisticated computer game, set in an alternate universe full of rich detail, dangerous characters (both live-action and CGI), even more dangerous weapons, and Easter eggs to reward the most eagle-eyed gamers.

The film opens in a mobile game market. The protagonist passes by street vendors pushing heavily pixelated 8-bit computing-style fruits and weapons – a visual metaphor for an online app store. In a nod to a literary classic, the hero is soon lured down an alleyway by a grizzled white rabbit to an underground black market populated by darker characters and vendors trading guns and weapons – all in full HD quality to show that mobile gaming’s now become serious.

THE RESULTS

Biggest Samsung chip launch in history 

135m impressions in 1 month

89.9% view-through rate 

HACKING A PHOTOBOOTH IN PICADILLY CIRCUS

CAMPAIGN BIG AWARDS SHORTLIST

To launch Samsung’s most advanced image sensor ever, we put it in the least advanced camera in town. Proving that 200MP can make any photo epic. What set out as a social content campaign turned into a viral activation.

Making a chip that brings a 200MP image sensor to smartphones famous in a category infamous for waving the “new and improved” flag. By appealing to consumers who are jaded by upgrade culture. That’s no mean feat. Sure, a bazillion pixels sound cool, but are they worth the wallet punch? The improvements in new models are seen as incremental and people are catching on and taking longer to upgrade their phones. Naturally, this behaviour was becoming a problem for Samsung. Our job was to convert disbelief into desire.

STRATEGY

To steer the conversation away from high specs and numbers and focus on the benefits users can experience in their everyday life, we explored how consumers feel about smartphone photography. We learnt that photos have lost their magic. With filter layered upon filter, photography has become a show. It’s not real anymore. Photo sharing is now a default. People are no longer taking photos to capture their memories but to put on their feed for external validation in the form of likes. But there’s a cultural shift towards authenticity.

People want to break free from the fake, shallow, blink-and-it’s-gone world of smartphone photography, whilst capturing precious moments in the most detail possible. We spotted an opportunity in this trend and positioned our pioneering ISOCELL chip as the antidote to latte foam art, selfies and hotdog legs.

Giving our high-spec chip's a purpose: To recreate the magic of photos.

More pixels = more detail = more soul

In a category that has been weaving a narrative around visual brilliance, specs & perfection to sell-in the benefits of more megapixels to consumers, we decided to walk the talk and show people just how epic 200MP looks. We hacked an unassuming photobooth that stood in the middle of Piccadilly Circus, and let people experience the technology for themselves – on one of the world’s biggest billboards, instantly, completely unedited, and without any pixelation or filters.

RESULTS

Results

Over 3 days our booth captured hundreds of photos and broadcast them on Europe’s largest advertising screen. Our brief was to create content that could be used in comms to dramatise the power of Isocell. But by day 2 we were caught in the influencers web, with lines back to Leicester Square of revellers queuing for their moment of fame.

The photo booth generated over a thousand pieces of content. Resulting in over 30 million video views and over 3 million engagements. Overall we reached reached more than 70 million followers. And increased the likelihood to upgrade by 78%.