The archive · Marketing & Growth · Marketing decision · 2024–2025
Samsung ships the S24 Ultra as Korean groceries, forcing unboxers into its AI translator
Samsung sent reviewers groceries from its 1938 Daegu store, written only in Korean — the phone's AI translator was the key to the unboxing.
Samsung
What it had to solve
The Galaxy S24 Ultra's leap forward was its built-in AI, but years of similar-looking phones had made unboxing videos predictable. Samsung Australia needed the launch moment itself to demonstrate the AI rather than talk about it.
How it works
By 2024, phone unboxing videos had become a formula: open the box, admire the device, test the camera. Samsung believed the Galaxy S24 Ultra's real leap was AI, and it wanted Australians to feel that leap inside the launch moment itself.
Clemenger BBDO's idea was to stop selling the phone as new and sell it as old. The packaging took unboxers back to 1938, when Samsung began as a grocery trader in Daegu, Korea — noodles, dried fish, a milk-carton wrap for the device, a personalised receipt, and a two-colour catalogue hawking the brand's history.
The twist was language. Every element was written in Korean, so Australia's most influential unboxers had to turn the phone's own AI translator on the packaging to understand what they were holding. The more they translated, the more of Samsung's story they uncovered — the original logo's wheat and stripes reappearing on a reusable shopping bag, and the three stars behind the name 'Samsung' hidden in the design.
The result turned a routine format into a puzzle that reviewers wanted to solve on camera. Samsung leant into its Korean identity in Australia for the first time, and the agency measured a 10x lift in unprompted posts, 13.8M followers reached and a 4.4x average engagement rate.
Why it lands
- The packaging made reviewers demonstrate the AI translator on camera instead of describing it, turning a feature claim into visible behaviour.
- Unreadable Korean gave every unboxer a natural reason to film the translation process, so the campaign produced the exact content it needed.
- The 1938 grocery-store story gave the tech giant a human, surprising origin that no rival could copy.
- Detail density rewarded curiosity: the longer an unboxer explored, the more history (logo, stars, catalogue) they found, so content depth scaled with engagement.
What it did
The agency reports unprompted social posts rose 10x, 13.8M followers were reached and average engagement rate hit 4.4x. The unboxing experience also earned D&AD 2025 Wood Pencils for Packaging Design and Creator Content, a Gerety Silver, and points at ONE Asia.
What you can take
When a product's selling point is a capability, force the audience to use it: the constraint becomes the demonstration, and the media do the explaining themselves.
Since then
The launch experience continued to travel as award work: D&AD 2025 gave it Wood Pencils in Packaging Design and Creator Content, Gerety added a Silver, and ONE Asia credited it across packaging and influencer categories. Its numbers — 10x unprompted posts and 13.8M reach — became the agency's evidence that a launch stunt can double as a product demo when the demo is built into the experience itself.
Sources
- Packed Full of History — D&AD awards archive
- Samsung — Packed Full of History (case study)
- AUNZ Wins Big at D&AD 2025 With Bold, Purpose-Led Work
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