Media buying for the Olympic Games isn’t cheap. That’s why Samsung has found a new marketing trick for Paris 2024: It’s giving away its phones to athletes. For The Drum’s consumer tech focus, the CMO explains why.
Benjamin Braun, Chief Marketing Officer at Samsung, meets The Drum in the transition period between the Olympic and Paralympic Games in Paris. Having just arrived for our interview from the Eurostar, Braun admits to being a little sleepless and groggy, so he starts the conversation with a quick history lesson on the origins of the Olympic Games, rounded off by a slideshow of images and the odd funny anecdote.
At the 1988 Seoul Olympics, the first games sponsored by Samsung, the South Korean electronics giant provided phones to athletes so they no longer had to run to a phone booth to call home. The brand later developed the first app to solve the problem of Olympians missing their event or training because they didn’t know where to go – “you couldn’t just Google it back then,” says Braun.
For Paris 2024, Samsung gave 17,000 Olympic athletes a gold version of its latest foldable smartphone, the Flip6, with the Olympic rings engraved on the back. The phone was preloaded with data, Samsung’s Olympic app and a personalized message for the athletes. They could tap the phone to get free rides on the Paris metro and free drinks from vending machines.
TikTok is full of unboxing videos from grateful recipients. “Sometimes we forget that as an athlete, you don’t make a lot of money, so getting a free phone is a nice thing,” says Braun.
The company introduced the “victory selfie,” which allowed medalists to take photos of themselves on the podium. After receiving their medals, winners were presented with a Samsung phone on a silver platter to capture their big moment.
“Usually when people go to the podium you see really boring people posing for corporate photos. But now there are so many great, funny photos instead of the usual boring photos,” says Braun.
On the day Braun met with The Drum, the Guardian’s front page featured one of the selfies taken with the Samsung phone. “The attention is incredible,” says Braun, who described the selfie as “a bit of a marketing ploy.” During the two-week Games, Braun is most proud of the viral selfie of the North and South Korean athletes sharing the podium after winning the table tennis doubles. Because it’s a South Korean company, most press reports about the image credit Samsung as the camera manufacturer.
“Samsung doesn’t even make the front pages of newspapers or digital news when it launches new products, but now it’s suddenly on the front pages,” says an enthusiastic Braun.
However, the coverage was not all positive. There were numerous articles and social media posts about the selfies, accusing the Olympics of selling out to brands. For example, The Independent headlined: “Samsung Galaxy Z Flip: The unusual device athletes are using for controversial selfies at the Olympics.”
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Braun dismissed those comments, saying most of them were raised with the Olympic Committee and not with Samsung itself. “It didn’t give me any sleepless nights,” he said.
Whether you agree with the criticism or not, Samsung made headlines during the Games despite spending less on media than in previous Olympics. Media is very expensive during the Olympics, with the price of the metro in Paris doubling, for example. “Everything has become super expensive, media prices have become incredibly high,” explains Braun.
Samsung traditionally runs its Olympic campaign by buying media on-site in the host city and through the broadcasts, but for Paris 2024, the company saved money and achieved greater reach through giveaways and product placement.
“These are Samsung phones. We produce them at cost. So if you compare the price of giving away 17,000 phones to the media exposure we got, there is no comparison at all. You can do econometrics or ROI or ROAs, whatever it is, there is just no comparison.”
Braun described this strategy as minimal effort for maximum output. “We didn’t have to do anything because the athletes did everything for us, were on the podium or made unboxing videos on their social media channels,” he explains.
The biggest triumph was getting into the athletes’ feeds, says Braun. “Samsung is now represented in their channels with all of their fans. Even if I bought millions and millions worth of media, we wouldn’t be in their channels.”
Although he didn’t give specifics, Braun claimed Samsung had the largest share of voice during the games compared to the other seven global sponsors. Aside from exposure, Samsung saw a 23% increase in Flip6 sales compared to the average day before the Olympics. “I bet a lot of other brands are looking at what Samsung has done at very low cost and with maximum exposure and trying to figure out how we can replicate that.”
Now that Braun has found a successful strategy, he faces the challenge of innovating for future Olympics. “The problem is that you can’t do the same thing every year. You have to come up with new marketing methods because it gets boring,” he says. For now, however, Braun can be satisfied that this year’s intensive efforts have paid off.
