The trouble with hitting the ball out of the park your first time at bat is that people then believe every subsequent performance should be a home run. Just ask the Germany-based marketers at Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd.'s European division and their U.K. agency partners at Smyle Creative Ltd., whose initial success in virtual events led to stratospheric expectations the following year.

When COVID-19 caused the Internationale Funkausstellung Berlin expo (IFA), one of the world's largest consumer-electronics shows, to switch to a hybrid format back in 2020, Samsung Europe tasked Smyle with producing a virtual activation for the press, retailers, partners, and consumers that reflected the company's cutting-edge status. So while other exhibitors stampeded toward what would become the popular – and often mundane – road of 3-D renderings of physical booths and static landing pages on official show sites, Samsung and Smyle blazed their own trail with Life Unstoppable. The aptly named activation featured slam poetry performances, direct mailers of earbuds, and the virtual Samsung House, an immersive product showcase powered by the video-game platform Unreal Engine that offered up augmented reality and gamification. "We challenged the audience's expectations," says Matt Margetson, Smyle's founder and innovation director. "The whole thing didn't feel like a stage or an exhibit. It was more authentic to the product and playful for the audience, and it didn't take itself too seriously."

Life Unstoppable was a smash hit, resulting in an almost 300-percent bump in attendance compared to IFA 2019, a 29-percent jump in dwell time, a 372-percent spike in product mentions, and a slew of marketing awards. But not long after the Smyle crew unboxed their latest trophy, Samsung came calling with a new mission: IFA 2021 had cancelled, so they needed to do it all over again – but with a fresh angle.

Take Two
Needing to recapture lightning in a bottle, Margetson met with his team to review what propelled Life Unstoppable to such success and determine what could be fine-tuned for their second time a bat. "We wanted to keep all the signature parts of Life Unstoppable – its playfulness, its storytelling, and its interactivity – but push it forward and make it more human," Margetson says. "At this point of the pandemic, we'd all been stuck indoors with almost no contact with other people. Unreal Engine is great, but we needed to draw out the human element. So how could we challenge that and take it up a level?"

The answer, Smyle felt, was to combine the feature-rich functionality of a gaming engine with the realism and emotion of a cinematic film. Such a coaction of compelling storytelling and digital magic might just be the spark for a refreshed Life Unstoppable campaign. The setting for highlighting Samsung's latest offerings would still be a home, only this time it would be a physical set with real-life actors going about their day. But this wouldn't be a "sit back and watch the story unfold" affair. Instead, Smyle wanted to offer viewers an "e-xperience," a new industry buzzword for making screen-based activations more rewarding via customization and engagement. "Immersive storytelling opens your mind and creates a reason for being there," Margetson says. "If you talk about features, you'll hold viewers for a minute. Tell them a story, and you'll hold them for longer."

Creativity, like nature, abhors a vacuum, which is why Smyle immediately followed an inspirational North Star in the form of Wes Anderson, the celebrated multihyphenate behind such films as "The Royal Tenenbaums," "The Grand Budapest Hotel," and "The French Dispatch." Anderson's auteur sensibilities – eccentric characters, heavily art-directed sets, and signature use of camera tilts – have made him the darling of both critics and the box office, and his style is instantly recognizable to millions. Placing the new Samsung house in an Anderson-type world would infuse the entire campaign with a playfulness, wit, and je ne sais quoi befitting a tech brand eager to differentiate itself in the virtual-event realm.

While Anderson isn't unfamiliar with producing branded entertainment, having done two short flicks for Prada, Smyle approached the film-focused agency Free Turn Ltd. and its cofounder and chief creative officer, the director Jel Groman. Together with Groman, the Smyle team started storyboarding and fleshing out their cast of colorful characters. The house would be inhabited by members of the idiosyncratic Unstoppable family, including a fitness-obsessed, tracksuit-clad dad; a rocker mom; a septuagenarian grandmother who used to be a pro wrestler; a chef-in-training daughter; and a son who aspires to be the next David Copperfield. Each character would have a starring turn in a different room of the Unstoppable house and interact with a parade of Samsung products, from gaming monitors and artificially intelligent vacuum cleaners to modular refrigerators and Galaxy smartphones, all in their natural habitat.

The teams presented their pitch to Samsung Europe, who recognized the importance of injecting the campaign with some personality and irreverence. "It's easy for a tech brand to be very straight and just talk about specs and features," Margetson says. "That's hard to take even in a live setting, let alone watching it on a screen. That's why we had to think differently and use techniques from theater, film, and gaming to connect with the viewer." Samsung gave the concept the green light, so then it was off to an airplane hangar in Oxfordshire to shoot "Life Unstoppable: House of Surprises."

"And...Action!"
Smyle and Free Turn spent four weeks in Oxfordshire, about 60 miles northwest of London, building the set and doing principal photography. The seven-room Unstoppable house was built as a series of adjacent sets that were then digitally composited into a two-story structure. As for the set design, it was quintessential Wes Anderson: a mix of oversaturated and pastel colors, patterns and furnishings that read as simultaneously retro and modern, and diorama-like rooms that allowed the camera to capture long tracking shots. "The look was enough on-brand to be recognizable, but enough off-brand to make viewers curious," Margetson says. Once the set was complete, shooting began with professional actors playing the Unstoppable family and young Samsung employees from multiple European countries cast as presenters who extolled the products featured throughout the home using a script developed by the U.K. office of the public-relations and marketing agency Fleishman-Hillard Inc.

To provide the customization and engagement Samsung craved, Smyle used the digital platform Wirewax to add interactive "layers" to the film that allowed viewers to learn more about the specific products that interested them. For example, the filmmakers shot multiple takes of the scene in the Unstoppable parents' bedroom. In one take, a Samsung presenter stands in the foreground and hypes the company's Bespoke AirDresser, a top-of-the-line clothing care system, installed in the closet behind her. In the second take, the rocker mom character enters the room (minus the presenter), opens the AirDresser, and grabs a chain-embellished jacket. With a few clicks of a mouse and some help from Wirewax, the two takes were then layered together. In the finished film, a pulsating hot spot appeared over the AirDresser while the presenter was talking. If a viewer was interested in the product, clicking on the hot spot would cue the mother's entrance, which seamlessly occurred behind the still-speaking presenter. Meanwhile, viewers who weren't turned on by the latest advances in garment steaming could just ignore the hot spot and listen to the narrator. In other words, participants got to feel like they were controlling the action, much like they would in a video game.

The House of Surprises featured seven of these "choose your own adventure" hot spots offering more in-depth content on Samsung's 612 Soundbar, Jaxon esports news app, and more. All told, the 45-minute film spotlighted almost three dozen products in six whimsical vignettes brought to life by the equally waggish Unstoppable family. And after a final edit, it was time to introduce the world to the magical home.

Roll Tape
A few weeks before the film's Oct. 12 debut, key members of the European press, retailers, and Samsung's partners received animated email invitations asking them to RSVP for the premiere. On the day, a clock on the campaign's landing page counted down to zero, a digital curtain went up, and viewers were greeted by a prerecorded message from Samsung Europe's chief marketing officer. The film kicked off in the kitchen, where the two Unstoppable children were up to some antics. Then, room by room, viewers explored the rest of the house and saw how the Samsung products within improved the family's lives as they explored their various passions.

Shortly after the premiere, Samsung used the film set to conduct remote one-on-one tours with VIP partners. "We had brand ambassadors on site, and clients 'called in' for appointments with their Samsung reps," Margetson says. "The remote rep could then direct the ambassador to demo certain products." And on Oct. 18, a slightly modified cut of the film was released to consumers in 17 European countries via Samsung's website. This version omitted the introduction and Wirewax hot spots. Instead, new hot spots directed viewers to their respective countries' Samsung ecommerce store, where they could make an immediate purchase or request more information.

The House of Surprises may not have box-office receipts to report, but there's still no doubt Smyle and Samsung's efforts resulted in another grand slam. Of the 3,740 guests who attended the film's private premiere, 60 percent watched the full 45 minutes – a stat Margetson attributes to the movie's unusual premise and casting. "We've all sat through product launches where some senior male lead is on a stage and instantly loses the audience's attention," he says. "This was the opposite. We had young, dynamic, diverse presenters and actors telling amazing stories in this awesome environment. Why would you want to click away from that?" And remember how the 2020 Life Unstoppable campaign blew Samsung's past in-person attendance figures out of the water? Well, House of Surprises ended up besting the previous year's viewership by 174 percent, thanks in no small part to the popular appeal of a piece of branded entertainment wrapped up in a Wes Anderson bow. And that, as the saying goes, is a Hollywood ending. E

Click here to view the Wirewax version of Life Unstoppable: House of Surprises.