Andy Barwood on Samsung's In-Store Stunt

If executed celeverly, experiential advertising can be an excellent way of marketing your brand to consumers in an immersive live situation they'll never forget. Naturally, Halloween offers endless opportune moments to pounce on an audience and last year, electronics brand Samsung did just that with a brilliant in-store stunt at London's Westfield Shopping Centre.

Below, Indicia's ECD, Andy Barwood, breaks down the brand's tactical trick in 2014 and offers insight into why the idea worked so well.

Halloween is the perfect opportunity to drive sales by tapping into customers’ fun side. YouGov data shows that a third of people aged 25-40 in the UK celebrate Halloween and this is only growing. A campaign that caught my eye last year is Samsung’s Halloween Zombie Switch prank which does just this.

To celebrate the occasion and promote its new curved ultra-high-definition television, the brand played a prank where two twin girl shop assistants (one dressed normally, the other dressed up as a zombie) switch part way through a conversation with a customer to give them a spooky shock.

This simple experiential stunt is a quirky campaign allowing the brand to join the conversation and create engagement with its customers around Halloween, without going over the top. It is a good execution, subtly playing on the closeness to reality of the new technology in 4K televisions. Not only is it experiential, but it is an immersive experience that encourages sharing of the event online to drive further engagement. A really fun campaign with great results.