How do you reinvent the Samsung 837 NY center of brand experience, open it up to a much larger audience, and somehow deliver something unexpected that gets the world talking?

At its core, this was our challenge, and it was a big one. We knew the word metaverse was trending thanks to the pivot by Facebook, and our brand clients wanted to make a splash by CES. This gave us less than 5 weeks to pull off something spectacular, an experience where success was to be predicated on buzz.

We quickly realized a Web3 path was the right gamble—a way to create a gamified brand experience that was unprecedented in a metaverse platform, relying upon NFT rewards and unique quests to activate the pillars of the brand in an unexpected way.

Our idea was to deliver a fresh take on Samsung 837, the center for brand experience in the Meatpacking district of NY, fusing in new technology and a path for greater audience inclusion, all through a first-of-its-kind, Web3 powered metaverse experience. We created 837X, based in Decentraland, to beautifully inject the core pillars of the brand: sustainability, connectivity, and customization. We went bold and strayed away from simply recreating the real-life store. We designed a forest that injected Korean creatures into a quest for life and preservation, created an open-air, galactic theater to stream the CES keynote, and a three-sided live stage to house a mixed-reality dance performance. Visitors entered the experience through a city-like facade, but from that point on the activation was anything but expected: they explored and fulfilled quests, earned NFT badges, and even had a chance to win one of our three unique wearable collections.

Unlike the consumers of other metaverse platforms, like Roblox and Fortnite Creator, our audience was a more sophisticated and slightly older tech consumer, causing us to shift our focus to an emerging Web3 environment. In landing on Decentraland, for our CES installation, we only had a possible audience of 25K active daily users, versus 30M+ for Roblox. The platform is also not mobile compatible, therefore preventing Samsung Galaxy users from entering it on their devices. This was seemingly a tough sell, but we banked on the fact that our digital installation would be unprecedented in the metaverse landscape, and by going Web3, it would open up a new area of communication between our brand and our core audience. The primary KPI was creating buzz by taking the unexpected approach, we proved that the right experience, served to the right audience, in the right way, can be the recipe for success.

Given that we had under 5 weeks until CES 2022, we had to move crazy fast to create 837X. Once we locked in on Decentraland, we began concepting the different facets of the experience in order to go beyond the expected and quickly realized we had to invent a new production process in order to deliver a Web3 metaverse experience. We knew the outside facade would be the only expected element, but we still did tests to add emissive lighting and effects that would give our city block a metaverse vibe.

In creating on Web3, we worked with an anonymous collective to visualize and build the experience and quests, primarily with Blender 3D models, before importing into Decentraland and injecting the JS layer on top of it. We used Korean inspiration and pulled from folklore, to design the three wearable collections. The NFTs started with flat reference before moving into GLB files and textures to build out everything in 3D. We constantly balanced the polygon material counts to push the visual boundaries of the platform. We wanted it to be the most beautiful experience ever delivered in a Web3 metaverse platform.

We worked with a private Decentraland landowner to house and deploy the experience, having to propagate it across all their proprietary servers before we could test it. We dealt in three different cryptocurrencies: Ethereum for the exchange of production build services, MANA for the creation of the wearable collections, and Polygon to mint all the NFTs that we distributed. We created 3 games within the experience, injecting our brand pillars into each one—all leading to different prizes. As a result, we launched the Samsung Web3 community, and in total have created 250,000 pieces of NFT art and fashion, all delivered through our immersive 3D world.

Samsung 837X was by all measures a smash hit for the brand. Since the launch at CES, we have recorded over 3.7B total media impressions, including 1.4B in the opening 3 days. This was supported by 98% positive social engagement. In terms of business drivers, we had 77,000 samsung.com visits from our Decentraland metaverse experience, and through the distribution of 250,000 NFT badges and wearables, we have 80,000 community members now engaged with us through their MetaMask Web3 wallet. We affected Web3 culture, causing countless commentary videos and game tutorials, and were published globally in the press in over 15 languages. The experience moved the crypto market causing a spike in MANA by 25%. In total, we threw the biggest event ever in the history of Decentraland, showing the metaverse world and the Web2 world just how impactful the right type of experience can be.