A case study by Friday! and Samokat: How to utilize interactive mechanics to increase brand knowledge

The project team talked about game mechanics within a TV show.

In 2023, Samokat partnered with three culinary shows on the Friday! TV channel: “Chef Battle (Bitva Shefov),” “The King of Desserts (Korol’ Desertov),” and “Pastry Chef (Konditer).” The integration in “Pastry Chef” became the largest, as it featured an interactive game called “Meringue Crunch.” It allowed to raise brand knowledge of the Samokat brand by 19% among viewers of Friday! This was told to Sostav by the project representatives.

About the shows and collaboration

“Chef Battle” featured a game of “Trick or Treat”: during the live show, viewers voted for either a “trick” (an unpleasant punishment for the chefs) or a “treat” (a pleasant surprise). At the end of an episode, Renat Agzamov and Konstantin Ivlev, the chefs and hosts of the project, would perform the action that received the most votes from viewers. In “The King of Desserts,” viewers could purchase confectionery from a sweet selection in the Samokat app during the show and win a branded apron. According to the organizers, the largest partnership was implemented during Season 7 of “Pastry Chef,” with online retailer Samokat as the product partner.

As part of the collaboration, Samokat added special meal kits to the shelf—sets of products for making cakes from the show. Viewers could purchase them while watching “Pastry Chef” by using the QR code placed on the screen during the show on Friday! For the season finale, the Samokat team decided to expand the interactive mechanics of the collaboration and developed the “Meringue Crunch” game together with Friday! This activity was named after the phrase “I don’t hear the meringue crunch” said by the host of “Pastry Chef” Renat Agzamov in one of the episodes. Short clips from the episode have collected over 1.5 billion views online.

The game mechanics of “Meringue Crunch”

During broadcasts of “Pastry Chef,” an interactive bar featuring a meringue cookie would appear on the screen, inviting viewers to break the cookie and win prizes from Samokat. Viewers then used the on-screen QR code to access a special landing page where they could tap on the interactive object in the form of a meringue cookie. The more viewers tapped the meringue cookie on their devices and the more times they did so, the quicker the dessert would break on air on Friday!

Viewers had to tap the meringue cookie a total of 5 million times to break it. A prize QR code would then emerge from inside the dessert. The first ten viewers who scanned the code received a certificate for 10,000-rubles for shopping in Samokat.

Results

According to MediaScope, 5.6 million viewers watched the final episodes of “Pastry Chef” featuring the game “Meringue Crunch".

10,000 unique users played the game and tapped the meringue cookie over 20 million times.

The record number of hits from one participant reached 54,000.

It is worth mentioning that during one of the episodes, the limit of 5 million taps was reached in the first 15 minutes. The channel team quickly added a way for viewers to keep playing: the tap limit was increased up to 12 million. Viewers reached it within the next 25 minutes.

At the end of 2023, Tiburon Research conducted a marketing and product study to assess the effectiveness of advertising integrations in the “Pastry Chef” project.

The study revealed that knowledge of the Samokat brand was 19% higher among respondents who watched the show with advertising integrations on Friday! than among respondents who did not watch the channel. The spontaneous brand awareness increased by 13% among respondents after the advertising integrations were on air on Friday! “Meringue Crunch” won the MIXX RUSSIA 2023 interactive advertising competition in the Creative Use nomination.

Aleksandr Borzov

Head of the Attraction Marketing Department at Samokat

We often use gamification to communicate with our users, but implementing game mechanics into a TV cooking show was a real experiment for us. In this project, we decided to let viewers not only watch the show, but also participate in it. We are glad that the audience “got into it” and responded positively to the project.

Dmitry Prokopchuk

Head of the Integrated Projects Team at SberMarketing

We developed the project with the main goal of involving the audience in communication with the brand. The channel team proposed a simple but very engaging mechanic of “Meringue Crunch.” It was very much appreciated by the viewers of “Pastry Chef”: they actively tapped the dessert and won prizes from Samokat. Together with our partners, we plan to deliver even more gamified projects.

Svetlana Dorogonova

Head of Sales and Communications for the Friday!, 2x2, TV-3, and Saturday! TV Channels of Gazprom-Media Sales House

Using game elements to promote brands is an effective way to draw the attention of the audience and drive their engagement with the product. It also increases loyalty due to the positive emotions evoked by the brand.