Samsung’s connected devices are truly amazing, and empower people to use

home technology in a whole new way. However, these products, along with the technology that connects them, can seem techy, complex and unrelatable, meaning that the opportunity afforded by this innovation is lost on most consumers. Furthermore, advertising for smart home devices often features bland portraits of perfect nuclear family homes, complete with 2.5 kids, making it difficult for Samsung’s Millennial audience to relate to the technology or the setting in which it is shown.

Our brief had one clear objective: enable a Millennial audience to actually experience Samsung’s smart technology in a unique, exciting and innovative way that is both entertaining and educational at the same time, making use of the latest cutting-edge digital technology.

How do you explain Samsung’s smart home technology to a notoriously hard to engage Millennial audience? Not just by talking about products - that’s pretty boring. No, you do it by inviting them to experience the technology and see its benefits firsthand. Where better to do this, than in a home Millennials already know and love? Samsung partnered with Family Guy to open the door to one of the world’s most famous households and bring the possibilities of the Intelligent Home to life. Using Google AR core, we mapped a virtual 3D version of the Griffin home to the real world for the first time, allowing users to walk around and fully immerse themselves in every detail, experiencing Samsung’s connected technology along the way. Through a funny, interactive narrative co-written with Family Guy’s writers and featuring characters from the show, we demonstrated how Samsung’s amazing connected home products really works.

Two key insights impacted the planning of this project: 1) Our millennial target audience increasingly crave live experiences, and 2) the best way to understand Samsung’s connected technology is to experience it firsthand. Therefore, our solution was to create a live experiential IoT showcase. However, to make it truly entertaining, we wanted to elevate the experience beyond the real world and invite users into a home they actually wanted to visit. Thus, creating an immersive AR experience which allowed users to interact with the products within a virtual environment presented the perfect solution. The smart home technology Samsung wanted to promote can seem boring and complex, so the priority was to gamify and entertain users during the experience. AR Core allowed us to fully immerse users in the entertainment world of Family Guy, while allowing them to interact with the products and actually see connections between them in augmented reality.

The experience went live at IFA, the world’s leading consumer electronics tradeshow in Berlin, August 2018. Production began one month before the activation, during which time, collaboration with Family Guy ensured authenticity in the design process. Family Guy co-wrote the narrative, and sound effects and animations were taken directly from the show, whilst Samsung’s smart home products were cartoonified to fit within the Family Guy universe. Google AR Core allowed us to map the physical set to the virtual Living room and Kitchen and Augmented Images let us build an app that responds to 2D images in the user's environment. In this instance, we used the physical Family Guy front door as a trigger marker to start the experience. The app was preloaded onto Note9s, handed out at the start of the experience, and the phone’s camera, along with the user’s walking motion, tracked movement around the space.

The experience represented an AR first for Family Guy, and the first time the Griffin household had been recreated in immersive 3D. This experience is bigger, more interactive and more able to run on smaller devices than any AR experience before it, enabling a level of immersive detail that is truly ground-breaking.

The activation at IFA engaged over 3897 people over 7 days - that’s over 60 people an hour, and a further 4,280,534 impressions from a video of the experience online, increased the activation’s reach beyond just the physical audience at IFA. The experience received incredibly positive feedback on social media - 70% of online conversations about the activation were joyful. Most impressive, however, was the fact that visitors to the experience spent an amazing 6.5 minutes on average interacting with it, an astounding period of time to maintain interest in content through any medium, and especially at a frenetic tradeshow. 88% of users agreed that the activation made Samsung’s smart home devices more interesting and the partnership gave Family Guy the unique opportunity to create a 3D Augmented Reality version of the Griffin household, engaging fans in the European market in a new and exciting way.