Samsung Electronics is putting its foldable flagship on the world’s most photographed screens. The company said on 8 September that it has rolled out a global digital out-of-home (DOOH) campaign for the Galaxy Z Fold8 series under the banner ‘Welcome to Foldables’, running across six landmark locations in major cities.
Where the campaign is running
The activation kicked off on 2 September at Seoul’s Gwanghwamun KT Square, where twin large-format digital billboards mounted on the building’s exterior play the ad simultaneously to daytime foot traffic. From there, the campaign is being staggered across other landmarks, including COEX K-POP LIVE in Seoul, Shibuya Station in Tokyo, and Piccadilly Circus and Outernet in London.
The Tokyo placement leans into night-time visibility, with rooftop screens at Shibuya’s famously crowded crossing pushing product imagery above the neon. It is a deliberate contrast to the blue-sky daylight framing in Seoul — the same creative, tuned to two very different viewing environments.
The message: thin, light, durable
Samsung, which launched the world’s first foldable smartphone in 2019, has built the campaign around three product claims:
- Ultra-thin design — the slimmest form factor in the series
- The lightest foldable phone in the world
- Durability built for long-term use
That is a tight, disciplined brief for outdoor. DOOH gives you a few seconds of attention at best, and three benefit pillars is roughly the ceiling for what a passer-by will absorb. Marketers running large-format campaigns often make the opposite mistake — cramming feature lists onto a canvas that rewards a single visual idea.
Commercially, the timing tracks. Samsung says the Galaxy Z Fold8 series recorded the highest pre-order volume of any Galaxy smartphone in Korea and is now on sale in 106 markets.
Why outdoor, and why now
DOOH has quietly become one of the fastest-recovering channels in the media mix, and premium landmark inventory — Piccadilly Circus, Shibuya, Times Square, and in India, sites like Mumbai’s Bandra-Worli Sea Link corridor or Delhi’s Aerocity — now functions as much as a content studio as a media buy.
The real audience for a Piccadilly Circus takeover is not just the people standing in Piccadilly Circus. It is everyone who sees the vertical video of that billboard on Instagram, Threads and YouTube Shorts over the following week. Landmark DOOH is engineered to be filmed, and Samsung’s staggered city-by-city rollout is designed to keep that feed replenished rather than blowing the whole budget on one day.
What Indian marketers can take from it
Foldables remain a premium, low-penetration category in India, which makes category education — not just brand preference — the job. ‘Welcome to Foldables’ is doing exactly that: the line frames the purchase as entering a category, not choosing between rivals. That is a useful move for any brand selling something buyers do not yet fully understand.
A simple framework if you are planning a landmark DOOH burst:
- One idea, three words. Decide the single visual and the maximum three claims before you buy the screen.
- Design for the camera. Assume the asset will be shot on a phone, vertically, from street level. Test the crop.
- Sequence, don’t dump. Staggered city launches create multiple news moments from one production budget.
- Match daypart to environment. Daylight sites need contrast; night-time sites need luminance and negative space.
- Close the loop. Tie the outdoor window to retail, pre-order or trial-zone activity so the spend is measurable.
For a product whose entire pitch is that you have to see and hold it, the biggest screens in the world are a logical place to start the conversation.
Source: STARNEWS
