Samsung – Beacon
Role — Art Direction, Design, Motion Graphics
Agency — Razorfish
CHALLENGE
Create a global marketing campaign to support the launch of the Samsung Galaxy S III—the Android phone to rival the upcoming iPhone 5. The physical device wasn’t yet ready for release, which added another layer of complexity to our challenge.
CONCEPT
Exclusivity sparks desire. And since data networks were expanding and desktop browser use was diminishing, we saw an opportunity to deepen and drive more direct connections to our audiences’ phones.
SOLUTION
Build a mobile-first affinity community that raises awareness, drives conversion and inspires brand loyalty. To develop our community, we offered exclusive content to give owners a reason to brag and outsiders a reason to belong—a reason to choose Samsung.
We created a personalized content hub available only to Samsung Galaxy S III owners that offered a rich, curated experience to encourage exploration, discovery and community. Owners accessed the responsive mobile site through the homepage of their devices. We called the experience Samsung Beacon—a content distribution platform that was for and about mobile culture. We built the Beacon brand to feel inspiring, engaging, exclusive and empowering. Aspirational photography of youthful people out in the world, exploring and having fun, drove emotional connections, and a cool color palette and light effects created a dreamy atmosphere of potential.
To support Beacon, we devised a holistic content ecosystem to surround and entice our audiences. As the first mass-market phone to feature an accelerometer, this meant the Galaxy S III could track motion and gestures. Inspired by this and the Galaxy III’s other unique sharing features, including “tap and grab” made possible by NFC, we created a range of discoverable content that lived out in the wild to foster organic, spontaneous interactions. These included music downloads available at bus shelters and “swipe passing” to monster wall displays, where you send content from your phone to any other Samsung device (TV, other phones, etc). We also installed custom 3D games in 50 theaters that audiences controlled by moving their arms.
RESULTS
The 2011 Beacon content hub and its supporting campaign was an experiment of many firsts that today live on in the marketplace: from leveraging NFC technology to create thrilling experiences that extended beyond the purchase point to creating a brand whose look and feel was adopted as the marketing language of Samsung’s flagship Galaxy phones marketing. Today, the Samsung Galaxy S series are now the most widely used phones in the world.