How do you keep a relationship exciting after almost four decades? Just ask Samsung Electronics and the Olympic Games.

Samsung has been involved with the Games since 1988, when it served as a local partner the year the event was hosted in Seoul, South Korea. A decade later, the tech giant became a Worldwide Olympic Partner around the same time that it started exporting mobile phones globally. That long history means the Samsung brand has grown in conjunction with the Games over the years, according to VP of Global Marketing Sophia Kim.

“Brand awareness and brand recognition has grown so rapidly, and we have enjoyed that growth with the Olympics by contributing to the Games in a meaningful way,” Kim told Marketing Brew.

After 38 years of Olympic sponsorship, Kim said that ahead of Milano Cortina 2026, the Samsung team was focused on finding ways to involve the brand with the Games beyond commercials, even as activations and business goals have evolved countless times.

Continue reading here.—AM

If you watched the 2022 Crypto Bowl or the 2000 Dot Com Bowl, you might be used to ads from one sector dominating Super Bowl commercial breaks.

During Sunday night’s lackluster game, it became increasingly clear that this year would be known as the AI Bowl. Fifteen of the 66 commercials aired were either for AI companies or were made with AI, according to iSpot.

The spots ran the messaging gamut. Some addressed fears of an AI takeover, with Amazon’s spot for Alexa+ depicting Chris Hemsworth imagining his imminent doom at Alexa’s behest. Others pitched AI as a tool to do things you couldn’t before (OpenAI, Google Gemini, Ring, Meta and Oakley) or a way to relieve users of their workload (Microsoft Copilot, Genspark, Wix, Base44). Others addressed what’s to come for the future of AI, be it advertising (Anthropic) or agentic AI (AI.com).

The glut of ads and the messaging variety indicated to some experts the challenges the AI industry faces, including a growing pressure to stand out in an increasingly crowded market.

“It becomes a classic marketing problem of differentiation,” Derek Rucker, a professor of marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, told Marketing Brew. “‘Which product do I use and why?’ I think it’s natural to see these AI firms move to the Super Bowl.”

Beyond that, AI companies are tasked with delivering tangible business results, not just hype. “Those companies are on the end of their growth curve,” Allen Adamson, co-founder of brand consultancy Metaforce, told Marketing Brew. “They need to generate revenue. Everyone understands that AI has a lot of potential, but now it’s time to see, [to] start seeing what that potential is beyond company evaluation and investor valuation levels.”

Read more here.—KM

Each Super Bowl there are typically a few dominant themes. Some are questionable (ahem, Toilet Bowl), while others are expected (the Beverage Bowl and, maybe, the Wellness Bowl).

It’s no surprise that this year was dubbed the AI Bowl—and it also featured some AI-brand-on-AI-brand violence. OpenAI, which is in the process of rolling out advertising in its flagship tool, ChatGPT, went head-to-head in the game with competitor Anthropic, which, in its ads, disparagingly depicted what ads in AI chatbots could look like.

Ahead of the Super Bowl, Marketing Brew caught up with OpenAI CMO Kate Rouch to get a sense of OpenAI’s strategy, as well as why brand execs quickly and publicly responded to competitor Anthropic’s spots.

What was the thinking going into this year’s campaign? Were you definitely going to be a Super Bowl advertiser again? This year we wanted to also really communicate to people what’s happening, right now, in this moment. It’s not just business as usual…Our perspective is that this is a tool to extend what’s possible for people, and we see that in the data…What we’re really doing is trying to say, “Hey, this is a time when all Americans are sitting together, watching the same thing, having the same discussions.” There aren’t that many moments like that in our culture anymore in our media environment, and we really want to use that time to try to put a vision for the future out there—that really the best way to predict the future is to create it, and that we can all participate in creating what’s next, as opposed to maybe sitting back in fear.

Read more here.—KM

Some brands are using generative AI to parody generative AI itself. Many campaigns from brands are tapping into consumer fatigue with “AI slop” while still embracing the tech. Here’s why the strategy can work and where it risks backlash.