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.

Prior to the Games, we identified potential barrier defying moments and scenario-planned around them, 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.

Through monitoring social conversations, hashtag usage and sentiment, we tailored our content in real-time to the most engaging topics and moments.

For example; Fiji had never won an Olympic medal and their Men’s Rugby Sevens team made the final. We created responses for each outcome so when Fiji won Gold we had ad units pushed live congratulating them across Facebook, Twitter and display.

A custom dashboard allowed us to optimise ad-units in real-time and by analysing this data we retargeted our most engaged audience across the web using dynamic display, which pulled in tweets from our feed and enabled people to like or retweet them instantly.

When live events didn’t have a stand-out story of “defying barriers”, rather than being silent we used pre-prepared content featuring athletes that were relevant to our campaign.

This campaign generated over 1 billion impressions across Programmatic inventory, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Tumblr globally.

Please refer to the confidential information section for a full breakdown of our campaign’s results.