CAMPAIGNS / SELECTED WORKSAMSUNG ELECTRONICS ROMANIA · 2025—2026
Campaigns
Culture moves first. The brief follows.
Three campaigns built the same way: find the tension people already live with, take a position on it, and measure the answer against a campaign that actually ran rather than a number invented for the deck. What follows is the tension, the move, and the result.
This page is not here to brag. Awards are a poor proxy for judgement and every number below belongs partly to a team and an agency. It is here because a way of thinking is hard to describe and easy to demonstrate — so this is what happens when a cultural reading gets turned into a commercial decision, written out with the reasoning exposed and the benchmark named. Argue with the method, not the trophies.
RECOGNITION
Top Global Innovator, IBM, 2020 — for a social intelligence tool
Employee of the Quarter ×4, IBM
CURRENT
Employee of the Quarter, Samsung Romania, 2025
Team of the Quarter ×2, Samsung Romania, 2025
BUILT AND WON
SEROM AI Festival — winner, individual and team
A behavioral intelligence tool and a generative engine optimization tool
TEN RITUALS COLLECTED, FOUR MADE OFFICIAL BY PUBLIC VOTEModern folklore, written down for the first time.
URBAN RITUALS
SAMSUNG GALAXY S26
25 MAY — 5 AUG 2026
AGENCY: CHEIL ROMANIA
CONTENT MARKETING · BRAND ENGAGEMENT
Folklore didn't die. It moved to the sidewalk.
Young Romanians said two things that should not fit together: 78% wanted to stay connected to local heritage, and 65% found traditional folklore outdated and detached from their lives. The campaign took that contradiction literally.
THE TENSION
A generation that wants belonging and refuses the version on offer
Heritage was being handed down as a museum piece: static, inherited, curated by someone else. 82% of young audiences reject passive consumption in favour of co-creation (GWI, 2025), and 62% of Gen Z report lacking meaningful connection to a wider community (Deloitte, 2024).
Any brand lecturing them about tradition was guaranteed to fail. In the phone category, hardware excellence had stopped being a differentiator — it was the entry fee.
THE MOVE
Treat their habits as folklore, and mean it
Outfit checks. Post-club shaorma on the curb. Festival wristbands kept all summer. The bag of bags. These are rituals with rules, and nobody had ever written them down.
The campaign applied full ethnographic seriousness to unserious behaviour — creators worked as field observers, the community submitted its own rituals, and public votes decided which ones earned official status and a formal definition. The phone stopped being the subject and became the instrument.
RESULTBENCHMARK: “SAY YES TO YOURSELF”, 2025 — SAME BUDGET AND TIME FRAME
MetricBenchmarkObjectiveResultReach5.5M+2%5.68MVideo views11.7M+2%12.4MEngagement535K+5%697.2KEngagement rate9.6%+5%12.26%Followers gained7K+5%25KSubmissions and votes945+5%1,000
Six of six tracked metrics cleared their objective. Follower growth came in at roughly two and a half times the target — the clearest signal that people moved from watching to contributing.
THE SINGLE STRONGEST NUMBER, DRAWN TO SCALE
FOLLOWERS GAINED · BENCHMARK
7K
FOLLOWERS GAINED · RESULT
25K
3.6×AGAINST THE PREVIOUS CAMPAIGN, SAME BUDGET
WHAT IT PROVED
People stopped watching and started contributing.
Every other metric beat its target by single digits. This one beat it by two hundred and fifty percent, and that gap is the finding: the campaign did not buy attention, it issued an invitation. A person who submits a ritual and votes on someone else's has done something a view count cannot represent — and it is the only outcome here that compounds after the media stops.
TWENTY YEARS OF THE SAME SIGNAL, FELT LOUDER EACH YEARThe picture got sharper. The memory got heavier.
RICH EMOTIONS
SAMSUNG TV
26 MAR — 19 JUL 2026
AGENCY: CHEIL ROMANIA
BRAND ENGAGEMENT · INTEGRATED DIGITAL
Twenty years of leadership, and nothing new to sell.
Samsung reached twenty consecutive years at the top of the global TV market. Most subsidiaries ran an anniversary ad. Romania had the same budget as the previous year, no product launch, no new technology — and a category where everyone else was shouting specifications and discounts.
THE TENSION
The set nobody thinks about is the object everyone remembers around
Online has overtaken television as the primary media channel in Romania, at 42% of total media time (Media Fact Book, 2025). Yet 43% of Romanians watch online content on their TV set (GWI, 2025). The device didn't lose its place in the room; it changed what flows through it.
In Romanian homes the television has never been an appliance. It's the thing the family sits around — for a match, a New Year's broadcast, a film everyone has seen four times.
THE MOVE
Stop celebrating the technology. Celebrate what it let people feel.
Nobody remembers the resolution. They remember where they sat, who was next to them, and how it felt afterwards. The anniversary was reframed from twenty years of engineering to twenty years of shared emotion, using collective memory as the connective tissue between generations.
A first for the category: a partnership with Nostalgia Radio, moving the story from a screen-first medium to an audio one, with a twelve-part editorial segment tracing how television changed the way Romanians remember.
RESULTBENCHMARK: PREVIOUS TV LAUNCH CAMPAIGN — SAME BUDGET, NO PRODUCT NEWS
Engagement landed at twelve times the prior campaign. The Nostalgia Radio collaboration had no benchmark to beat — it reached 1.9M views on Instagram and 1M post views on TikTok, setting the first standard for co-branding in the category.
THE SINGLE STRONGEST NUMBER, DRAWN TO SCALE
ENGAGEMENT · BENCHMARK
14.9K
ENGAGEMENT · RESULT
178.7K
12×AGAINST THE PREVIOUS CAMPAIGN, SAME BUDGET
WHAT IT PROVED
Removing the product made the product matter more.
Same budget, no launch, no new technology — and engagement at twelve times the previous campaign. The variable that changed was the subject: twenty years of engineering became twenty years of being in the room with other people. Categories that have run out of specifications to announce usually still have a memory to return, and the memory is cheaper.
SIX UNWANTED PRESENTS, REMATCHED TO THE PEOPLE WHO WANTED THEMThe habit was never the problem. The dead end was.
(UN)FORGETTABLE GIFTING
SAMSUNG
12 — 31 DEC 2025
AGENCIES: CHEIL ROMANIA, GRF+
SOCIAL MEDIA · CREATIVE IDEA
Eight in ten Romanians don't like what they unwrap.
Regifting is the national open secret. One in two Romanians passes on a present they were given, against 11% in Spain and 17% in France. Every other brand spent December telling people to buy more. This one had a small budget and a different idea.
THE TENSION
A ritual everyone performs and nobody admits to
8 in 10 Romanians dislike the gifts they receive, and mugs, scarves, pyjamas and cosmetics top the list of what gets quietly moved along (Ipsos Digital, November 2025). Compromise was the defining word of the season's shopping.
Millennials were the target and the most fatigued group: overloaded, budget-conscious, and being shouted at by campaigns with far deeper pockets.
THE MOVE
Don't fix the habit. Build it somewhere to live.
Instead of moralising about regifting, the campaign gave it infrastructure: a dedicated “Forgotten Gifts” section on OLX, one of Romania's largest marketplaces, where an unwanted present could find the person who actually wanted it.
On-device AI did the unglamorous work — cleaning up the photograph, rewriting the listing so a neglected object looked worth having. The technology earned its place by being useful, not by being announced.
MetricBenchmarkObjectiveResultEngagement114.7K137.6K273.9KVideo views8.9M10.68M15.1MTraffic44.5K53.4K109.7KAI tool trial ratebaseline+50%4.21× targetUser-submitted listingsnonefirst of its kind400
Engagement doubled the objective and traffic came in at nearly twice the target. The marketplace section had no precedent to measure against — 400 people listed a present they'd been given.
THE SINGLE STRONGEST NUMBER, DRAWN TO SCALE
TRAFFIC · BENCHMARK
44.5K
TRAFFIC · RESULT
109.7K
2.5×AGAINST THE PREVIOUS CAMPAIGN, SAME BUDGET
WHAT IT PROVED
The habit was never the problem. The dead end was.
Every competitor spent December arguing that people should buy better gifts. This campaign accepted that they would not, and built somewhere for the mistake to go. Arguing with a behaviour costs money for as long as you keep arguing; giving it infrastructure costs once and the audience does the rest.