Branded content marketing is becoming more and more important for marketers in the Netherlands, as they see that their product & brand shown or used in a natural non-promotional way, reaches their consumers very good.

In the Netherlands there is a trend towards partnerships between brands and events. Brands want to connect with the events audience; because this audience is present on location based on their own interests.

In our case ‘Starttheconversation’, success was created by connecting our brand to the right events with very relevant influencers & umfield for our target audience; so the event partnership strengthen Samsung campaign idea to serve and empower our audience.

By having a perfect fit, we had the ability to reach our audience based on their own interests through our influencers & the events authority; connecting with our audience in a natural way. By connecting the influencers and our audience, Samsung was seen as the enabler of creating this amazing experience.

Kicking off with supermodel Doutzen Kroes via price-activation (signed phone-flipcovers); chief editors Karin Swerink (VOGUE) & Hilmar Mulder (GRAZIA) and Sunnery James (Dutch DJ) were our influencers to endorse #starttheconversation.

They were present at big fashion & music events, where we created world first Google-Hangout-On-Air road show. In a custommade Glass box on location, our influencers would have valuable live conversations with our audience in the Hangout & answering tweeted fans questions. These Hangouts were streamed LIVE on Twitter (Twitter world premier)!

All created content was distributed in 2/3-minute chunks through Online & Social Media, to scale to the community.

NOTE: The campaign & action itself is closed, but the fixed content is still there.

Unfortunately for now this only works on desktop, as this is a temporary solution

Our campaign broke all our targets with strong confidence; an overwhelming earned media ratio (index 438 ‘earned versus paid’) and overall content reach of 70% within our Stand apart audience. Resulting over 1 million video streams (index 181), thousands of tweets and posts generating 3 million twitter reach (index 1000).

Best of all: sales went through the roof and doubled the forecast in the first week, growing rapidly to climax index 400 at the end of the campaign, directly driven by #starttheconversation and the sales promotion with signed flip covers (source: Samsung/Gfk). An excellent example of great content marketing strategy.