In August 2014, a story broke online that revealed black cats were being abandoned in record numbers because people thought they don’t look good in photos.

So Samsung New Zealand decided to prove them wrong.

The day after the story broke we teamed up with the SPCA for a photoshoot with abandoned black cats, using only a Samsung smartphone.

The next day we released a tutorial video on Samsung’s Facebook page to teach people how to take great black photos. We also published the photos we’d taken to prove it could be done.

The day after the story broke (August 2014), we arranged a photoshoot with abandoned black cats at the SPCA using nothing but a Samsung smartphone.

Then we turned the footage from the photoshoot in to a tutorial video that we posted to our Facebook page.

We also posted the photos we’d taken with the phone to prove that all the tips in our video worked.

Our tactic was to get our Facebook fans to share it so that, eventually, more people would know how to take a great black cat photo.

Thousands of fans then shared their black cat photos with us to show their support for our campaign.

Within hours of posting our tutorial to Facebook, it became Samsung New Zealand’s most shared social media post ever. Just days later it became a national story, featuring on New Zealand’s most popular morning news show. We had an earned media value of over 10 times our small budget. And with one social media post, we managed to reach over 500,000 people, all just days after the story first broke.