Samsung wanted to promote their Neo QLED big screen television and its numerous features. But consumers often wait a decade before purchasing a new TV, regardless of the latest upgrades in technology. Samsung had to find a way to break through consumers’ purchasing apathy and inspire excitement about the Neo QLED TV.

We encouraged Samsung to focus on college football fans because of their devotion to watching their teams play every Saturday. We believed this audience would be more receptive to messaging promoting a television with the best game-day viewing experience possible.

Campaign objectives were focused on demonstrating the quality of the product and communicating with college football fans on a personal level using iconography belonging to their favorite team, thereby creating a connection and brand affinity between the product and fans to increase engagement and awareness of the Samsung Neo QLED TV.

The most diehard college football fans build literal shrines to their teams filled with all sorts of memorabilia, mementos and other collectibles. Our creative concept celebrates these fans and positions the Samsung Neo QLED TV as the ultimate centerpiece for every fan shrine to enhance the game-day viewing experience.

Because of the tribal nature of college football, our partnerships enabled us to craft advertising specific to the fanbases of twenty of the largest college football programs in the US. Whenever our target audience saw the Neo QLED TV in action, they also saw their team’s game-day highlights featuring the mascot, marching band and fans in a billion shades of colorful glory.

We not only drummed up excitement around the Neo QLED TV, but also delivered creative that recognized and appealed to the allegiances of these hardcore fans.

Leveraging proprietary fan databases, we were able to aggregate data from ticketing, merchandise sales, digital engagement from official team athletic sites and social pages to curate content and deliver media targeted specifically to the fanbases of twenty elite college sports programs. We reached these fans wherever they were in the digital realm and forged an emotional connection to Samsung’s Neo QLED TV by featuring the television in a shrine decorated with their team’s colors and showcasing a variety of team memorabilia.

Samsung also wanted to incorporate additional segments to our 1st party audience to include technology enthusiasts and families, so 3rd party contextual and interest segments were added to further refine the target audiences.

We set out to create a campaign on behalf of Samsung that resonated with the fans of twenty different college football teams. In order to achieve this, we’d shoot a spot featuring one specific team, redress the set and populate it with another team’s colors and mementos, and then shoot it again. This process was repeated twenty times to produce over 125 pieces of creative content for CTV, programmatic banners and video, and social posts.

For branded content we went to the homes of diehard fans and filmed them in their actual team shrines watching football on the Samsung Neo QLED TV with family and friends.

We executed a three month media campaign that ran throughout the height of college football season. Using data-driven pinpoint targeting leveraged across the digital media landscape, our school-specific custom creative reached fan audiences across our twenty partner schools.

Campaign results were determined through measurement of media engagement across programmatic banners and video, social, and CTV. Performance was evaluated on Click Through Rate (CTR), Video Completion Rate (VCR), and Brand Lift on social.

The media execution delivered 244,549 clicks, an overall CTR of .42%, and 57.7 million impressions, exceeding our goal of 52 million by more than 10%.

More specifically, banners achieved a .23% CTR over the course of three months, measured at 4.6x over the industry benchmark. Social channels yielded a more impressive .68% CTR across static and video. Standard ad recall on social channels saw a 6.9% brand lift, 1.2x growth over Technology sector benchmarks. Programmatic video yielded an 88% VCR, measured at 1.2x over industry benchmark, while CTV achieved an impressive 99% VCR across all twenty schools.

High levels of engagement and positive brand lift spoke to the success of the campaign’s media strategy and execution.