Situation: Celebrate the launch of the Samsung Galaxy S24 Series (31st Jan 2024) with a memorable, disruptive execution.

The brief: drive product name awareness and campaign recall by circle association – the bigger, and higher impact the better.

Our target audience was ABC1 15-54 adults with a focus on urban professionals in London. While the wider media plan focused on nationally representative targeting and delivery; we needed something standout to move the dial in the capital.

Objective: grow product name awareness by the end of Q2 2024.

Media insight: Advertising on the tube holds a unique place in the hearts and minds of Londoners - 7/10 agree they have time to take notice of the advertising, and 49% actually ‘like’ the advertising, beating all other media channels significantly.

By subverting a cultural icon (the London Underground map) we would bring a whole new, positive, meaning to commuter disruption!

https://www.marketingweek.com/exterion-media-tube-ad-platform-unlike/

The Royal Albert Hall? Stonehenge? Not big enough. The Circle line is the iconic Circle in London – literally running a ring around the city! And when we search for things on the Tube, the first place we go is the Tube map. But we wanted to do more than rename it, so we took over the moment of Searching - the perfect intersection between media and creative innovation.

The Tube Map is a world-famous brand asset – it’s been untouched for 90 years, so persuading Transport for London to work with us to adapt it was a huge ask. But for the first time in almost a century, it was totally reimagined –turning the whole tube network into a circle. And, emphasising the link between the device and the campaign execution, we created a social activation – inviting 100 runners to run 24km around 24 stations

We needed our affluent, tech-savvy Gen Z and Millennial professionals in London to notice and talk about this re-vamped Tube map with their friends and colleagues to shift product name awareness.

It had to be as big and unmissable as possible, so TfL, Global and Samsung collaborated to identify the busiest stations on the Circle Line to dominate. As one of the busiest stations in Europe with 3.2m footfall a week, and the home of Samsung’s flagship UK store, Kings Cross Tube was selected as the centrepiece of the campaign. Paddington, Westminster, Liverpool Street, Victoria and Blackfriars were also identified as high-indexing key interchanges.

Timing was crucial – the new devices were announced and available for pre-order from 17th January; and available to buy from 31st. We had to make a big impact in paid and earned media on the crucial first few days that the phones were on sale.

Samsung dominated all high impact, premium OOH sites in Kings Cross station, and created new media formats in all target stations. These traditional and non-traditional placements featured “Circle to Search” campaign creative, and the Circle to Search tube map. Alongside this, we replaced tube maps in all six stations with the new circular map and updated the way-finding signage in Kings Cross with signs pointing to the “Circle to Search Line”.

What could be more disruptive that re-branding a London staple that NEVER gets messed with. And running across multiple stations meant that we successfully create a massive sense of scale, reaching most regular Circle Line users.

The OOH campaign ran for two weeks, and was boosted by the Circle the City run – where 100 runners ran 24km around 24 Circle Line stations, to reinforce the link between the Samsung Galaxy S24, and the Circle to Search activity.

Total product launch campaign recall for the period was 16% higher in London than in the rest of the country.

Product name awareness was 10 percentage points higher for those who had seen the Circle to Search Line advertising, versus the national average – showing that it did an excellent job of cementing memorability and explaining a core product feature.

The Circle to Search Line work is reported as sitting alongside Social Media and Radio as the media channels driving uplift across all key metrics for the campaign (awareness, consideration, preference and purchase intent). A huge achievement for something with more limited scale than these two broadcast channels.

Earned media impact was also huge – with overwhelmingly positive social sentiment surrounding the posts and blogs that were shared around London and the UK. The Circle the City run content alone generated 992k engagements and 9.7m impressions.