Branded Entertainment in America has been relegated to primarily linear editorial formats and online distribution. While the open online ecosystem allows for a flood of this kind of material to find its own network in effect, there has been a shortage of out-of-the-box thinking around what “branded entertainment” can mean. In the cinema there are several advantages that allow a campaign to extend that definition to more integrated and meaningful programs. No longer is branded entertainment defined as a single editorial piece or long form ad. For the Samsung Galaxy S3 launch in the cinema, a platform was created that allowed branded entertainment to span beyond the 2' short, into gaming and interactive components. All while telling the same story around the brand and its product and reaching hundreds of millions of people.

Samsung’s charge to the agencies was to create something that had literally never been done before.

The solution was to engage the entire movie going audience in an innovative environment of group-game-play, with motion detection, on the big screen, in immersive stereoscopic 3D. The development of the entire program had to be completely developed in 6 weeks.

With the collaboration of teams across 4 continents, — never-been-done-before quickly translated into the invention of a new interactive 3D gaming technology installed in 53 theatres across the country.

Audiences would work together as human joysticks, waving their arms to control a Galaxy S3 handset on screen. What better way to drive the value of the Galaxy S3's breakthrough sharing features than through a shared, totally immersive gaming experience where the goal is to literally share content in the game. This was a creative execution directly inline with conveying the core value proposition and brand strategy of the phone.

Samsung spent nearly 10% of their total campaign budget for this massive launch on this specific in-theater campaign. Therefore the expectation of performance, innovation and impact was enormous. In this case, the audience games campaign delivered. Total unaided brand recall of the campaign was 65% and aided 82%, in a third party exit poll. 66% of respondents who played Audience Games liked it, 72% agreed the game was fun and 88% said it kept their attention.

With significant press coverage, special live launch events, over 150,000 actual game participants and over 200m total impressions over a two-month period, this campaign for the Galaxy S3 launch marked the largest single in-theater campaign in history.