The two years after Covid brought nothing but disruption. Disruptions to the supply chain. First no stock, then too much.

Disruptions to the shopper journey, no Omni-channel experience, consumers forced online, unable to touch or feel inventory to make decisions. The retailer.com sites inundated with demands from suppliers for onsite visibility competition real life touchpoints.

Disruptions to household budgets and fear of the future meant consumers could also hold off buying altogether.

Suddenly, the retailers’ traditional ways of going to market were not working.

Ensuring their inventory was being found and bought in an updated performance marketing landscape where they were bidding against each other at the SKU level was not their strength.

But maybe it could be ours.

We could help the retailers sell. But rather than handing over the funds as we always had, we had an opportunity to do it on our own terms.

In order to win at Retail in this new and changing landscape we needed to challenge the traditional model by devising and executing our own campaign in exchange for Retail visibility, versus buying into an existing retailer event. We wanted to show consumers how we had a key role across their entire lives. Not just a single mobile phone, or a domestic appliance, more than one TV or a watch.

We wanted to create demand generation above and beyond our retailers existing calendar with our own brand event. To have our biggest retailers go to market with all our products, at the same time in multiple countries.

A simple idea to create maximum noise and let consumers know that no matter where they shopped they could enjoy the very best of Samsung.

Week 29 of the 2023 retail calendar was booked as ‘7 Days of Samsung’ delivering Epic deals

This was a complex multi-market, cross-category, multi-retailer event, which had never been done before. We needed a centralised creative & media strategy to service over 50 retailers in 19 markets at once!

The look & feel needed to be a simple, elegant, leveraging a simple visual to quickly build awareness and work across 19 translations.

The media strategy had to eliminate counter bidding and cannibalisation of existing in-country campaigns (DTC and Brand work) - while driving to new pages on the retail sites which did not have organic traffic.

Where possible we leveraged the might of Retail Media which allowed us to directly target the retailers' shoppers in-market, and where Retail Media was not possible (since many European electronics retailers are yet to set up this offering) we leveraged targeting on social and display using data signals to identify shoppers in-market and serve them the right Retailer offer.

We went live from 18.05.2023 in 19 countries across 46 separate retailers online and in hundreds of stores across the continent.

The creative was consistent across all retailers and appeared online on the websites as well in-store and some offline media.

Programmatic formats went offsite to in-market social, DV360 and GDN audiences.

We used Facebook Collab Ads which sending back sales data to central for the first time. Where possible we leveraged Retailer's affiliate networks to drive traffic.

By the 2nd round of the campaign in week 39, we were piloting on-site formats with 50% of retailers, many for the first time. We coordinated all sponsored product activity to ensure no overlap between always-on and the promotional activity.

Each event lasted just 7 days - but the impact was felt for much longer at the Retail level, both through sales but also through strength of Brand.

This was our first campaign driving traffic to a Retailer. We were in new territory, but the learning curve was steep, and rewarding.

In 2023, Samsung ran ‘7 Days of Samsung’ twice. Week 29 was so successful a repeat was planned for Week 38.

46 retailers in 19 countries participated across our full range.

We delivered 633m impressions behind the retailers and brought 4M shoppers to their pages.

In a massive surprise we had not anticipated CTRs to be 2.3x our own DTC benchmarks, with CPC’s less than half of forecasts.

Based on 4-weekly sales averages, we managed to average lifts of +44% sell out revenue for those weeks for our mobile divisions, +20% lifts were seen for TV.

All in all we managed a staggering 5.7 ROAS.

7DOS is the single biggest branded Retail Cross Category Product event Samsung has ever had on a global scale