Our mission was to highlight the S24 range as more than a product refresh, positioning it as the smartphone that brings artificial intelligence into people’s everyday lives.

We know we had to puncture audience apathy, when it’s become harder to the capture attention and excitement for launch events. Over the years, the audience reach, levels of conversation and search volumes around flagship phone launches has been in decline.

Something else was on the rise: generative AI. While AI had mostly lived in chat, tech labs and business applications, 2024 marked a turning point in public curiosity. People wanted to understand how AI could fit into – and improve – their daily lives.

But this also meant that the number of AI launches and sheer volume of media coverage around generative AI (both positive and negative) was overwhelming.

By the start of 2024 people were evenly split on whether AI would improve their lives or not.

We saw this cultural shift as an opportunity. The Galaxy S24 range could become a way to bridge the gap between AI hype and real life experience. The star feature, “Circle to Search,” meant people could instantly get answers, turning everyday scrolling into easy discovery.

We found that this had potential to be a breakthrough innovation. It tapped into a shared digital behaviour – browsing feeds and seeing something intriguing – but offered a way to go further that felt magical, effortless, and useful.

This wasn’t just about showing what AI could do, it was about making people feel how it could help them right now.

Our focus for S24 Unpacked was to help people see and feel this for themselves, spurring them to’ circle the search’ for their next phone to the S24.

The 24 Unpacked launch focused on three things: resonance, relevance and reach.

We built resonance by kicking off the road to Unpacked with a bang. Our marquee moment, during CES, was a takeover of the newly opened Las Vegas Sphere.

We teamed up with Marvel Studios “What If..?” to create a teaser that hinted at a portal of endless possibilities, which Galaxy AI would unlock.

Never done before, this alone generated over 27 million YouTube views as Samsung became the first brand to leverage this spectacular canvas to a global audience.

To make S24 AI features relevant, we designed a campaign that mapped S24’s AI’s possibilities onto real passions people already cared about – travel, photography, gaming, and entertainment.

To promote the Unpacked event, our messages specifically addressed these audience interests, making the tech both relatable and desirable. Media plans were driven by audience data, identifying where consumers were already engaging and creating AI stories within those spaces.

To drive reach before, during and after the launch livestream, our platform selection was strategic and diverse. On YouTube, high-impact instream ads amplified anticipation of our event livestream. Instagram Reels, Stories, and in-feed ads spoke to a younger, visual-first audience. On X, “Heart to Remind” ads created a viral countdown effect that got people to tune in.

The strategy wasn’t just to inform; it was to involve. It made viewers part of something culturally significant and digitally immersive.

The campaign launched with a teaser phase. Building from the momentum of the Las Vegas Sphere teaser, reminder features in media triggered over 696,000 interactions, showing massive early engagement. We tapped into fan communities, creators, and tech enthusiasts, using targeted content to spark curiosity about the S24.

Then came the big moment: the Unpacked livestream. It was one of the biggest global livestream efforts in Samsung’s history, broadcast across multiple platforms and amplified by influencers.

Across Samsung.com, YouTube, X and TikTok, it was streamed live across the world from San Jose, California. We introduced the Galaxy S24 as an open gateway for secure and meaningful AI experiences.

K-Pop group TOMORROW X TOGETHER (TXT) and Mr Beast, among others, showed how they used the S24 to discover, capture, create and share.

After the event, we kept up the momentum by collaborating with K-Pop stars, including a viral post featuring BTS that garnered over 1.1 million likes on X. They directly showcased S24’s AI-powered features like Circle to Search, Nightography and real-time translation.

These were not shownt in technical demos, but through everyday scenarios that connected emotionally, like looking for a cool location while scrolling Instagram, or translating street signs on a trip abroad.

The Samsung S24 Unpacked campaign was not only a product launch , it became a global media moment.

Across TikTok, Youtube, the Teads network and X, we received a staggering 93 million views of the Unpacked event within just one hour of launch. This made it one of the largest global branded livestream events, ever.

Ultimately, the success of an S-series launch is judged by the public’s response. Search volumes each year are indexed against each other as a predictor of purchase intent. In 2024, the day of Unpacked and for the following two days, S24 eclipsed our best-ever volumes by +39.6%.

Social mention totals were up 116% on S23. We saw lifts in consideration in intent in critical markets. For example, in the US intent to buy following launch increased by 8.5%, and in UK we saw +2 pt lift in ‘Samsung is the leader in AI tech’.

And across key regions we exceeded all pre-order targets, including hitting 188% of our pre-order target across Europe.

The S24 didn’t just launch, it started conversations. It took artificial intelligence out of the abstract and made it useful, usable and exciting.

The campaign helped people see that AI was no longer just for tech enthusiasts, but for everyone.

And it showed what a smartphone could be when innovation has meaning.