Inside the campaign that turned an iPhone into a Samsung Galaxy

For over a decade, smartphone users have been cleaved into two pretty immovable camps: Apple or Android. If you’re a long-term Apple user, you’ve been immersed in iMessage, the App Store, and Safari for much of your adult life. And it’s easier to stay put and buy the next iPhone when your old one breaks, because you’re so tied up that you can’t even imagine what the alternative looks like. That is until you spot Samsung iTest, winner of this year’s Black Pencil for Mobile Media: an ad campaign that turns your Apple into an Android. 

Originally designed for Samsung New Zealand by the agency Tribal / DDB Group New Zealand, iTest is exactly as it sounds: a fully immersive Samsung experience, living on the iPhone home screen, that works, moves and feels like your phone just turned into a different model. It is, as Tribal / DDB’s Creative Director Brett Colliver notes, a mischievous poke at the market leader – “just cheeky enough, and all in good humour.” But that playful tone belies what is an extraordinarily skilful and successful piece of advertising – one which delivered over 13 million engagements, and a 10% rise in switches from Apple to Samsung in New Zealand. D&AD sat down with Colliver and his Creative Experience Lead Danillo Castillo to explore the insights behind the staggering success of this bold and innovative campaign.

Trust your allies

Building from an existing relationship with Samsung New Zealand, Tribal / DDB had, at first, been tasked with thinking of ideas for the launch of the Samsung Galaxy Note20, when Colliver and his creative partner Mike Felix offhandedly suggested tackling an even bigger challenge: that people are just afraid of switching from their iPhones. With Samsung intrigued, Tribal / DDB shifted footing from a phone campaign to a brand campaign, centred on the task of bringing the Samsung experience directly to iPhone users  – a task he credits as being fuelled by the enthusiasm of his clients. “John Alexander [Samsung NZ’s marketing manager] was clear that we had to make it happen. I’ve met a few enthusiastic clients over the years but his instant passion was very apparent. You need that, it’s critical.”

With the idea in place, Colliver had to charge his head developer, Castillo, with the epic task of simulating an entire operating system. Samsung would help with tester phones and imagery, but Castillo had to work out the rest. “When we started to think about the features we wanted to replicate, the list just grew and grew,” Castillo tells us. “At first glance, it looked impossible.” But the task’s complexity became part of its appeal to Castillo and his team; before Colliver knew it, Castillo was going beyond his brief to suggest new features that his team could embed into the campaign, making it even more immersive. “I have to give him huge credit,” said Colliver. “By the end he was just showing off!”

Solutions might already be out there

From the outset, the focus was on seamlessness: making iTest feel in every way indistinguishable from a Samsung, all the way down to the slightest drag of the finger across the home screen. Castillo remembers “screen-recording everything”, spending hours perfecting each wobble and jiggle of the animation. “We couldn’t afford for it to feel clunky,” Colliver told us, “it needed to feel smart and easy to navigate if we were to convince Apple users that the alternative isn’t a foreign language.” The key to success, Colliver says, was found in a little-understood technical feature called a Progressive Web Application (PWA) that would allow iTest to be built as a website, but function on the iPhone home screen as an ‘app’, giving Castillo total control of his animations. 

Through the PWA, Tribal / DDB could bamboozle the world with their level of immersiveness. “When it launched,” Castillo remembers, “all the developers in the forums were asking, ‘How did they do that? How does that work?’ Even my friends thought that I’d somehow hijacked their phone.” What’s more, since PWAs offer an ‘Add to home screen’ option which appears on the iPhone as an app box, the campaign could circumvent being nixed by the App Store – for as long as it stayed online, it was accessible to an iPhone user. “Discovering PWAs was a really exciting development for us,” says Colliver, “and hopefully it inspires other creatives, even ones outside of the industry, to consider what it might unlock for them.”

Ride the wave of success

While Tribal / DDB took care to manage every aspect of the iTest experience, they couldn’t have predicted just how quickly it ignited – Colliver described it as “one of the weirder experiences I’ve ever had of launching a campaign.” On day one of the launch, the group put out a small social post with the headline ‘Compare Apples with Androids – download iTest’, geo-locked to New Zealand, given that it was only intended for that market. By the morning of day two, Colliver recalls, they were stunned to find 17,000 people already live on the site. It had been screenshotted, and shared across the world’s tech outlets organically. “I won’t say it happened by accident, because we were going to do all that sharing ourselves, but the internet had already worked its magic for us.” 

Before they knew it, their local campaign was already having a global impact, being shared through YouTube and TikTok demos to millions of people. At the start of this year, Samsung Global got in touch with Tribal / DDB with even grander plans. “They loved it,” Colliver says, “and wanted to roll it out across the world, updated to fit their new 4.0 operating system.” It’s now awaiting rollout in all of Samsung’s biggest markets, with no telling just where it could lead in enticing iPhone users over to Android. To Castillo, the campaign’s success validates everything he loves about his job. “I love it when people say that something is impossible,” he says. “Nothing compares to the feeling of making it possible.”