Brief:
4 de diciembre de 2012 / Madrid gas station

Samsung praises their clients fidelity giving 50 € free in gas to all those that can show a Samsung device. This action had side effects as creating a huge traffic Jam and getting the gas station closed by authorities.

Translating the post written by Nicholas in puromarketing.com :

The campaign was profitable ?

At the time to evaluate the economic cost of the campaign, we get out the costs:  People that is in charge to make the campaign work + the gas that has been given out from the Samsung official account in twitter says that around 1000 persons benefit from the campaign:
50.000 € spent.

The profits are the following:  twitter mentions, Facebook, new fans, new followers, mentions in blogs and online newspapers, mentions in TV, radio, etc… That is hard to value, but if we calculate that 30 seconds in TV cost around  9.600 euros, and that a tweet, in this case the hashtag #enseñatugalaxy, was seen by more than 45.000 people,  the number of blogs and newspapers that published a related story are more than a 100 (Approx. data)
The profits can be valued in: 143.000 euros.

So using the ROI formula : (beneficio obtenido – inversión)/ inversión x 100 = 186

143000 – 50000 / 50000  = 186

So for each euro they spent they had a return of investment of  1,86 euros.

Now, with all my respect to puromarketing, that I follow in Twitter: I understand that all this are approximate data. But you cannot really calculate ROI this way.
First of all there are more operative costs. Samsung for sure invested more that only gas in this campaign. Marketing people + Authorities  plus I’m sure they had to pay the gas station and some fines. So definitivaly not 50000 €.
According to tweetreach #enseñatugalaxy had a reach of 74000  and about 79000 impressions. More than puromarketing says maybe because I’m posting this later. But even like this, where is the 143.000 € calculation coming from ?

And in the other hand, not all the mentions have been positive, I’m sure people that have been hours in the car just because of this marketing action have blamed Samsung, their personal and their mothers. Specially the ones that had to pay fines by the police.

I’m sure the only ones that are able to sensible measure ROI for this are the Samsung people itself with all the data. Any attempt to calculate this out of speculations is not feasible.

So has been this campaign profitable or just pure bluff ?  Time will tell.

To summarize, more than ROI, what I would evaluate in a campaign like this is if the branding action has been positive. If the people is more aware of the Samsung brand and if they are more likely to get a new galaxy in the following months after this. Or not.