Flipvertising

Read the campaign story

Samsung Australia’s Flipvertising made finding an advertisement the object of a game. The brand page documents a competition running from August into September 2022 around the Galaxy Z Flip4. Participants followed three clues through search and films before a further YouTube advertisement supplied a prize-entry code. The page now says the competition has ended. The One Show credits CHEP Network, The Sweetshop, The Editors and Ogilvy PR Australia.

Editorial interpretation: this reverses the usual assumption that an advertisement interrupts something more interesting. The advertising becomes a destination because the campaign gives it a role in a puzzle. The product demonstrations are part of that route rather than an unrelated commercial inserted after the entertainment. The mechanism could therefore encourage closer inspection, although a prize can also attract people with little interest in the product itself.

The brand explained that Google retargeting supported the final advertisement. This was a designed promotional sequence, not evidence that participants could freely control an algorithm or compromise a platform. The opened pages establish the historical rules and creative structure, not an independently verified sales effect. This analysis does not reproduce the competition or suggest that its original tracking arrangements remain appropriate, available or legally sufficient today.

Give attention a task with an understandable payoff

A puzzle can direct people toward details they would otherwise ignore, but the task must be understandable before they invest effort. Make the relationship between clues and the product meaningful. If a clue merely hides arbitrary information, participants may remember the difficulty rather than the benefit. Design an early success that teaches the format and provide a fair way to recover from confusion. The useful creative question is what someone needs to notice to solve the task. That observation should also help them understand the product, so the experience has value even when there is no prize.

Do not confuse voluntary play with informed data consent

Someone agreeing to play a game has not necessarily understood every data flow behind it. Explain which service records an action, how long data remains useful and whether participation changes future advertising. Provide a route that does not require unnecessary tracking when possible. In a small-team adaptation, a self-contained sequence can test the puzzle without transferring behavioural data across services. This also makes debugging easier: the team can tell whether a person solved the clue without guessing how a platform decided to deliver an advertisement. Transparency should be part of the experience rather than a difficult appendix.

Measure learning separately from prize pursuit

Completion rates can look impressive when rewards dominate the motivation. Ask what participants learned and whether they can explain the feature without repeating campaign language. Compare people who finished, people who stopped and people who chose a straightforward explanation instead. Do not treat the fastest solver as the most valuable prospective customer. An accessible direct route to the product information should remain available throughout. The strongest result may be discovering that a shorter puzzle creates better understanding than a long hunt. Keep the incentive, the entertainment and the product decision as distinct parts of the evaluation.

A bounded test for another brief

Proposed adaptation: a maker of a simple desktop organiser could build a three-step puzzle on one consent-light webpage, using original photographs to demonstrate storage, assembly and portability. Compare it with a normal feature page containing exactly the same information. Offer no purchase requirement, time-pressure prize or cross-site retargeting. Allow participants to skip to the explanation and record only anonymous completion events. Afterward, ask them to choose an appropriate use scenario and identify a limitation. This tests whether active observation improves understanding without recreating the historical advertising technology or creating a competition whose legal and privacy requirements exceed the team’s capacity.

Measure feature comprehension, time spent willingly, abandonment reasons and preference for the direct route. Treat puzzle completion as engagement only. Do not infer purchase intention, product suitability or durable brand preference from a successful answer.

Stop if the game requires misleading privacy claims, inaccessible clues, excessive effort or pressure to buy before participants can obtain the promised information.