In 2023, Belgium hosted the World Breaking Championships for the first time ever. Due to the relevance within the Gen Z community and the fact that a World Cup draws in a lot of spectators, Samsung took this opportunity to become one of the official sponsors.

The brief was straightforward: how can we maximize the visibility and presence of Samsung, and more specifically the new Galaxy Z Flip5 smartphone, with a booth and activation?

We created a brand platform called Flip The Rules. Not only does that name tie together the Z Flip5 smartphone and the breaking community, it’s also a 3-word summary of what Belgian b-girls MadMax and Camine have been doing their whole lives as female athletes in a male-dominated environment.

At the same time, Flip The Rules encapsulates Samsung’s brand values of self-expression and innovation, as well as its core brand message: #DoWhatYouCant.

The platform was born out of the conviction we felt in the first interviews with the athletes. Their energy was the most important inspiration to create a platform about self-expression, creativity in sports and challenging gender stigmas along the way.

Brave little Belgium suddenly found itself in the global spotlight, hosting a World Cup. Not only that, it is the first ever World Cup with Olympic qualification at stake, with breaking set to make its Olympic debut at Paris 2024. Too big of a momentum to waste on just a three-day booth.

So, we flipped the brief from simple and passive visibility to fulfilling an active role in the culture itself. From a one-time product booth to a long-term partnership. We redirected a significant part of our budget to support the Olympic dreams of two young Belgian b-girls, Maxime ‘MadMax’ Blieck and Camine Van Hoof.

This investment might seem unconventional for Samsung, yet it’s deeply rooted in their values of creativity and self-expression, as well as their tagline ‘Do what you can’t’.

Our unconventional approach paid off. We amassed 38M media views, which is 28% above benchmark. In term of views, the brand movie specifically even went +180% above objective.

PR-wise, the campaign got picked up more than Samsung expected. With 12,1M opportunities to see, we ended up at +73% above benchmark. Not unimportant: the original intention of having visibility at the World Cup wasn’t ignored. We managed to score 86% more user interaction with our booth than the client hoped for.

On social media, our challenges resulted in 90% more impressions than expected, as well as an increase in Samsung profile visits of 228%.