Samsung Goes Viral With Brickfish Campaign

SAMSUNG IS PROMOTING ITS MX10 flash memory camcorder with Your "Baby Love," a new user-generated content (UGC) campaign featuring Pussycat Dolls' lead singer Nicole Scherzinger. The promo invites users to film themselves doing a rendition of Scherzinger's single "Baby Love" and upload it for a chance to win prizes like the MX10, a 40-inch LCD HDTV or $500 cash. San Diego-based Brickfish is the viral marketing agency at the helm of the campaign, which runs until February 4.

The MX10 was featured in Scherzinger's video for "Baby Love," which debuted in late 2007, and Samsung turned to UGC as a natural way to extend the buzz. "Being featured in Nicole Scherzinger's video for 'Baby Love' was great. and we are excited to integrate music lovers into the experience," said Reid Sullivan, vice president of marketing for Samsung Electronics America. "UGC is a great tool to help us engage with consumers at a new level." Anyone can view and vote on the entries via the campaign microsite. Brickfish's UGC platform helps to facilitate viral adoption by allowing visitors to post comments and share their entries via email and IMs, as well as distribution across sites like Facebook, MySpace and Xanga.

According to Nichole Goodyear, founder and vice president of operations at Brickfish, the agency's proprietary platform has an analytics engine that tracks the movement of each piece of content. "As the content is shared across different networks, it sends the data back and it gets aggregated into campaign summary reports," said Goodyear. She added that the tool also provides detailed analysis of just how viral a campaign really is, complete with geographic and demographic data on user participation.

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Samsung Unveils Digital Music Store, Taps MusicNet

Consumer electronics and technology behemoth Samsung is now launching a digital music store in the UK, France and Germany, according to information received late last week. The initiative, which first bubbled in September of last year, taps backend services from MusicNet. The ecommerce play involves a mobile-focused subscription service, as well as an a-la-carte download option. The store is being layered into the existing Samsung Media Studio (SMS), a proprietary media platform designed specifically for a range of Samsung devices. "We have linked our internationally popular devices with a music subscription service and store adding a new dimension to how consumers interact with their devices," said Seungsoo Park, vice president of Sales & Marketing at the Digital AV Division of Samsung Electronics.

The offering will vary from region to region. The UK version features roughly 3 million songs, including content from the four major labels and over 55,000 independents. The group did not disclose licensing partners for France, though the track total in that market surpasses 2.6 million. In terms of pricing, monthly subscriptions will cost 10.25 pounds ($20.65) in the UK, and 14.99 euros ($20.43) in France and Germany. Individual track download prices will start at 1.15 euros ($1.57). The service is optimized for recently-released K3, K5 and T9 portable music players, though the group indicated that earlier devices will also be supported. The service is currently available at SamsungPlay.com.

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Samsung Launches Digital Music Service

SAMSUNG ELECTRONICS CO. HAS LAUNCHED a digital music service designed for its K3, K5 and T9 digital media devices. MusicNet will provide the platform for the Samsung Media Studio.

The company will start a marketing plan in France, Germany and the U.K to promote the product, which the company says will offer portable music subscriptions, unlimited downloads to Samsung portable devices for a flat monthly fee or purchase of single tracks or albums.--Karl Greenberg

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