How longtime Olympic sponsor Samsung keeps its campaigns fresh

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 is focused on finding ways to involve the brand with the Games beyond commercials, even as activations and business goals have evolved countless times.

Say cheese

For Samsung, awareness is no longer a key objective of its partnership with the International Olympic Committee, Kim said. Instead, the goal is “being a relevant brand, being an engaging brand,” she told us.

One of the ways the Samsung team has aimed to achieve that in recent years is through its athlete “victory selfies” snapped on Samsung devices from the podiums, which debuted at Paris 2024. Victory selfies will be back in Italy this year, according to the company, and the athletes are taking them via special Olympic editions of Samsung’s Galaxy Z Flip7.

Those special-edition phones feature the official Olympic and Paralympic logos and come with features designed to help athletes, like translation tech, wellness and fitness platforms, and the Galaxy Athlete Card, which lets athletes swap profiles and compete in interactive challenges.

“The podium moment is one of the most emotional and exciting moments for athletes, and those moments are usually captured as very staged shots by professional cameras,” Kim said. “We actually let our athletes…enjoy their own moments by owning those moments and expressing themselves in their own ways, in their own perspectives.”

To evolve the victory selfie concept further, the Samsung team is also introducing “victory profiles” this year, which will highlight certain athletes with portraits and other content that their teammates and competitors can view and share during the Games, including via the special-edition phones.

Show of support

It’s not uncommon for brands to partner with multiple Olympic and Paralympic athletes every cycle, but Samsung’s roster is particularly expansive, encompassing 70 athletes across countries and sports. As Samsung’s involvement with the Games has deepened over the years, including a worldwide partnership with the International Paralympic Committee first inked in 2006, the company has brought even more athletes on board, Kim said.

“We’ve learned that athletes are at the core of the Games,” she said. “Athletes themselves are the biggest celebrities during the Games time, so we know they are important and they are great storytellers of their own journeys to the Games.”

For Milano Cortina, Samsung’s athlete partners will be featured in short films and other content under the brand’s “Open Always Wins” campaign platform, which debuted during Paris 2024 as a way to communicate Samsung’s philosophy of “democratizing technology innovations,” Kim said.

As part of their efforts to meaningfully integrate the brand in the Games, the Samsung team is also supporting this year’s event by capturing additional perspectives of the Opening Ceremony, providing translation services for select volunteers, and supporting officiating with “real-time video review,” all provided via Galaxy tech.

The start of the festivities in Italy is still a couple of days away, but Kim said she and her team already have their sights set on LA28. The company set up an Olympic office there last year, she said, and has been in talks with the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee and the LA organizing committee about how Samsung can authentically incorporate its tech in the experience.

“We’ve learned that mobile technology will play a key role to make the LA Olympics more enriched and more immersive and a more connected experience, so we think we are definitely [playing a] role there,” Kim said.