The Olympics feels like your big tentpole moment, ever since Samsung started as a local sponsor in the Seoul 1988 games.
We’re a global Olympics sponsor, so we will be showing up at Milano Cortina 2026 in a big way, building on the success we saw at the 2024 Summer Olympics.
The Paris Games were just layered with stories, people were cheering for the top athletes, the underdogs, their country. It was such a feel-good moment, which lined up with our values and helped us cut through the noise.
What did you learn from the Paris Games that will carry over to Milano Cortina?
One thing we’ll bring back to the winter Olympics is the podium selfie, where we hand the winners a flip phone to take beautiful pictures with.
The bronze, silver, and gold winners might be from different countries that have different belief systems or different histories together, but having all of these athletes come together and hug each other and take a picture on the podium stands for so much more, beyond what our phones can do.
AI also extends what your phones and electronics can do. And it’s extending what you can do as a marketer. What did you do last year, and how is it impacting this year?
2025 was about putting a lot of the building blocks in place to make sure in 2026 we are ready to enjoy the fruits of the AI infrastructure.
Last year, we created a new media center of excellence, designed to help all of our marketing teams get more out of our media. A lot of that insight came from AI tools.
Email is also a very engaged channel, so last year, we used AI to analyze consumer behavior so that we reached you more relevantly, not just in terms of what you have interest in and a propensity for but also when you want to receive communication from us. We saw a lot of improved open rates and engagement from some minor improvements.
We’re testing and learning as we go, and we intend to be early movers so that we see the advantage.
Samsung already feels like it has the advantage, because it’s everywhere. Is that a gift, or a challenge?
Despite us being in 76% of U.S. households, only 26% have three or more Samsung devices.
At the start of 2025, we launched “SmartThings Meets AI Home,” which showed how people could get a better entertainment experience when they connected their Galaxy phone to their TV, or save time if they paired it with their washer-dryer.
We have a long way to go to help people achieve the seamless, ubiquitous, beautiful, AI-and-home experiences that we’re building.
That campaign is more than a year old. How’s it performing?
With each year, there is a learning that you improve upon. In May of 2025, we launched our first big campaign — the most significant budget we put behind this concept to date — and we saw a real step change in understanding and behavior.
