Samsung wanted to use their global Olympics sponsorship to increase brand consideration and to become the #1 most digitally engaging brand of all Olympic sponsors throughout The Games.

Although Samsung was an official Olympic sponsor, they did not have a clear affinity to sports, which many of their fellow sponsors did. It was clear we would have to find a different approach that created an authentic and meaningful connection to the Olympics for the Samsung brand, for the platform to deliver on the objectives of driving brand consideration and digital
engagement.

We discovered that for such a large global organisation people know surprisingly little about what the Samsung brand stands for – a brand that has a history in challenging conventions and defying barriers in technology and innovation. The Olympics provided the ideal platform to align the Samsung brand with the barrier-defying moments that the Olympics are so well loved for.

Rather than focus on sports we used sports as a lens to highlight barrier-defying moments and the real, human stories of the athletes. The stories that people would connect with and that reflect Samsung’s brand promise to continue defying barriers.
Our approach was not about the Usain Bolts and already famous teams of the sporting world. Instead we celebrated athletes who had faced adversity at every step of their journey but refused to give up, such as Tsepo Mathibelle – a
marathon runner from Lesotho who could barely afford protein to include in his diet. Although he finished last in the 2012 London Olympic Marathon, he gained worldwide respect and coverage of his story for refusing to quit the race.

Prior to the Games, we identified such potential barrier defying moments and scenario-planned around these moments, preparing responses to be executed if they happened. During the Games, we continued to identify stories and events that reflected our brand promise and published relevant content within minutes that was amplified with paid media support to drive scale.

The ability to build on existing conversations in an authentic way, whilst ensuring relevance to each country, platform and moment was critical to ensure the campaign achieved the objectives of business and communication success. Achieving success with this strategy required a high level of agility to create real-time reactive content on social media. Getting the right people in the room was crucial to enable lightning fast responses; the team of 32 included senior Samsung clients, lawyers, Publicis Media Content team members, sports content partners, strategists, analysts and creatives.

Our approach allowed us to react to barrier defying moments at speed and scale, keeping Samsung at the top of people’s newsfeeds for the 16 days of the Olympics.

Brand consideration rose by 9%, and 60% of people said they were likely to purchase Samsung the next time they bought a mobile device vs 54% for our competitor (Source: OnDevice).

Throughout the 16 days of the Olympics we delivered 390 million engagements across 8 countries with 1 in 10 people who were exposed to our communications engaging with them (by liking or retweet instantly).

Our hashtag #DoWhatYouCant was mentioned 60,000 times, the most of all sponsors – beating Coke (42,000) and P&G (25,000). (source: Brandwatch Media Monitoring)

We were recognised by the media and our peers as the top Olympics sponsor of 2016, dominating headlines globally. Numerous media outlets including Marketing Week, PR Week and AdAge proclaimed Samsung as the most talked about brand of Rio 2016 beating Coke, P&G and VISA.