Music production is no longer Point A to Point B, creator to listener. It’s a conversation leading to endless collaboration. With this activation, Verizon brought music-making outside the studio, allowing everyday people to collaborate with one of the world’s biggest producers. This content invited users into Timbaland’s process via a virtual tour of his hometown of Miami, where 5G public spaces acted as a source of inspiration, and finally put them in the coveted producer’s seat to become his latest collaborator via groundbreaking tech. Music is deeply personal, but with Verizon, Samsung, and Timbaland working together it becomes truly personalized.

Samsung launched the next generation of the Galaxy Z Fold and the Galaxy Z Flip in mid-Q3 2021. We were tasked with creating a unified campaign for both form factors, including value props of entertainment (primary) and 5G Ultra Wideband superiority (secondary). Although the foldable segment of the category was still relatively new, and that newness was not to be taken for granted, we were tasked to emphasize how these form factors accentuated Verizon’s entertainment and network use cases.

With over 600 new mobile device launches every year, how does one stand out from the crowd? For the launch of the flexible, foldable Samsung Galaxy Z Series, we partnered with multi-platinum hitmaker Timbaland to remix the idea of a typical phone launch.

To show how the Samsung Galaxy Z Series’ innovative form factor remixes your online life, we had the iconic producer write an original track designed to be remixed infinitely. We then built music-composing AI, trained it on Timbaland’s biggest hits, and used machine learning to teach it to ingest, interpolate, and synthesize. Then we gave our beatmaking bot the keys to Verizon’s Twitter account.

To consumers, the last 10 years of smartphone and network improvements have felt like a game of inches. People have set expectations for smartphone content consumption; they’ve seen it all, and that there are no real innovations. It seems that every network provider is shouting in the exact same language. Best network, best coverage, the best deal. Our key differentiator—the Verizon 5G Ultra Wideband network—is getting lost in the noise.

With this project, our goal was to highlight the unlimited power unlocked by putting the best, most innovative devices on the fastest network and therein unfolding a new world of entertainment, collaboration, and communication. Only Verizon and Samsung can break the constraints of yesterday’s form factors and yesterday’s network to bring users the new world of entertainment. The Galaxy Z Series is not just a new phone experience. When powered by 5G Ultra Wideband, it’s a gateway to the future.

All fans had to do was retweet Verizon’s post, and the AI would scan their profiles for public data to integrate into a piece of personalized content. In reply, each fan got their own custom version of the song in a music video featuring personal shoutouts, bespoke beats, and location-specific callouts. It was a truly epic drop. Paid units on Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube, as well as organic posts on Timbaland and Samsung US’s accounts, all drove the masses to our remix bot.

We brought Verizon and the Samsung Galaxy Z Series to top of mind, garnering 97% positive sentiment, #1 share of conversation for the first 48 hours, 6K+ custom remixes, and 99.6% of all mentions on @SamsungMobileUS at launch. We showed the world that the possibilities are truly endless when you’re using a Samsung Z Series device on Verizon 5G.