Samsung’s Oscar’s ad buy was so huge it seemed as close as any brand could get to actually sponsoring the 85th Academy Awards.
The giant South Korean conglomerate ran no less than six TV spots during ABC’s live ceremony broadcast – including a 90-second flagship commercial featuring film legend Tim Burton.
All the brand’s Oscar spots focus on a small technology company developing a new video game called Unicorn Apocalypse. The final ad, featuring Burton, sees the director interested in turning the game into a movie.
This ad, which continues the ‘Unicorn Apocalypse’ theme introduced earlier in 2013, aims to highlight how Samsung Galaxy products can be utilised for work as well as for play.
This Oscars ad series uses the game development theme to highlight a set of features across the Galaxy SIII, the Note 2 and the Note 10.1.
Samsung also used Twitter engagement during the Oscars and was one of several advertisers (including JC Penny and Pantene) to spent marketing money running promoted trends campaigns on Twitter in support of the TV work.
The agency behind the series, 72andSunny, also developed Samsung’s previous ‘The Next Big Thing Is Already Here’ anti-Apple marketing push.
Comment
2013 saw The Academy Awards officially rebranded as The Oscars and its awards ceremony, like the movies themselves, is an increasingly rare US TV event that reaches a wide set of demographic segments live.
While nearly one billion people worldwide reportedly tuned into the Oscars, US advertisers were spending $1.7m for 30-second slots during ABC’s three hour broadcast to reach 40.3m American TV viewers.
This represents a 3% rise compared with 2012, but down on the 2004 viewing record of 43.5m.
Of course, one of the main challenges that brands using the Oscars as a major platform to activate around is to develop interesting and compelling creative that engages most of the groups within this large, disparate audience. In the past this has often led to a great deal of generic, safe marketing.
Whether Unicorn Apocalypse bridges the gap between ‘engagingly original’ and ‘mainstream reach’ remains to be seen.
Some have criticised it for being too geeky and too focused on technology enthusiasts.
But according to statistics from Networked Insights suggests Samsung’s all-in Oscars investment was a social media success.
The data analytics outfit said that the brand had achieved the largest volume of social media chatter and the highest positive sentiment amongst brands that advertised during the ABC broadcast.
Links:
Samsung Website
The Academy Awards
