The Illegal Hour
Samsung
Issue 48 | September 2018
Agency
We Are Social
Creative Team
Alessandro Sciarpelletti, Daniele Piazza, Paulo Gonzalez, Dario Lo Nardo, Mattia Lacchini, Alessia Milla, Stefano Knoll, Paola Cantella, Giulia Camedda
Production Team
Federico Scaglia
Other Credits
Pietro Zambetti, Giorgia Ricciardi, Matilde Negrini, Erica Mattaliano
Date
March 2018
Background
Long hours at work and a busy social life made it hard for people to find the time to do their laundry. In addition, they needed to be physically close to the washing machine to load and unload it then move the load to a dryer. That took up precious time too.
The Samsung Quickdrive washing machine was designed to reduce laundry time by as much as one hour.
Idea
People hated wasting time and once a year the feeling intensified as a result of Daylight Saving Time.
On Sunday 25th March, the clocks went forward by an hour. Samsung took advantage of this to launch #ILLEGALHOUR. For the one hour between 2am and 3am, when people’s clocks were stealing an hour from them, in Italy they could go online and, at a heavily discounted price, buy the washing machine that would give them back that lost hour.
Results
1 sale every 2.4 seconds.
Out of stock in 18 minutes.
E-Commerce traffic was increased by 720%
Our Thoughts
In the run-up to March 25th, there was a lot of talk in the media (as, indeed, there has been every year) about DST. The European Commission has been considering abandoning it. So the whole point of this campaign wasn’t so much about selling washing machines (though they did) as about getting a message out to a wider audience through PR about how the Quickdrive saves an hour whenever you do the washing. It’s a message made relevant by its timing.