Samsung, Pitchs, Toolkits & Graft

I worked as the global creative lead on Samsung Global for a little over two years at Iris. During that time I travelled to Samsung HQ, in Seoul, twice to lead pitches. I also created and shot campaigns for two of their global handset launches.

Creatively, they’re massively challenging, but they were an important piece of business for the agency.

Samsung, Galaxy A9:
4xFun with The World's First Quad Camera

This global campaign was for the launch of their Galaxy A9 handset, which featured the world’s first quad-camera phone. We set out to show people that 4x lenses, equals 4x fun.

Shot in Hong Kong and directed by Gregory Ohrel, the ad is set to the music of Mina & Bryte (which we got early access to before it was released on the global music charts).

Samsung unveiled their handset (and our ads) at their 2018 ‘Galaxy Unpacked’ event, held that year in Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur.

Samsung Galaxy, The Power of 10

Iris is part-owned by Cheil, and this project was developed while working closely with Cheil’s CCO Malcolm Poynton.

After the initial concept was bought, I headed to Seoul, to oversee the production of the moving image and resulting toolkit. I presented creative development daily to Samsung clients and key stakeholders at Samsung HQ. The campaign ran globally in all of Samsung's markets.

Samsung Galaxy A7 launch shot in Vietnam

This next campaign was created for Samsung's first triple camera phone and its KSP of an Ultra Wide-angle lens. The camera lens could take photos as wide as the human eye's 120-degree field of view.

Our idea was to show moments where the ultra-wide shot revealed something wonderful and a little quirky that the users were missing in the standard photo frame.

Now the challenging part - after presenting 154 scenarios to the client, the scenes were whittled down to four (I'm still sad the grizzly bear scene got cut). And although they initially briefed us to be brave enough to take on Apple, the client wanted us to refocus the ad, around the reactions of people using the device.

Although shot in Vietnam, the TVC isn’t as polished as I would have liked, due to extremely tight production timelines. But I learnt numerous lessons about creative leadership because of it. And despite the crazy approval process, a maverick director who went rogue on the shoot in the Vietnamese jungle and a production deadline that made our first TV producer quit, the client loved the ad and revealed it at their global 'Upack' event in Kuala Lumpur.

Unfortunately, I don’t have any examples of the final outdoor creative as we intended it to look, but I snapped this poster on the Parisian metro, and as you can see the creative and copy were localised for individual markets.