As one of the world's leading technology brands, Samsung continues to redefine the premium smartphone experience through innovation, design, and intelligent connectivity.
With the launch of the Galaxy S26, the brand set out to introduce its latest flagship, using a full-funnel strategy designed to build early demand, drive consideration, and reinforce Samsung's premium positioning in highly relevant digital environments.
For the launch, Samsung partnered with Publicis Groupe and Eskimi to execute a regional campaign across Croatia, Slovenia, and Serbia. While the campaign shared a common objective across all three countries, execution required careful adaptation to local market conditions.
Samsung faces multiple challenges when advertising in Adriatic markets due to the region's fragmentation and complexity. Operating across diverse countries with different languages and varying levels of market maturity makes it difficult to balance local relevance with regional consistency, especially when performance is evaluated on a consolidated level, said Nemanja Milenković, Regional Account Director at Publicis Groupe.
A full-funnel approach
The Galaxy S26 campaign followed a two-phase strategy designed to support consumers throughout the purchase journey:
- The Pre-Order Phase: Focused on building early interest among brand loyalists and tech enthusiasts.
- The Launch Phase: Focused on reaching a broader audience with lifestyle and benefit-led messaging.
By combining both phases, Samsung engaged early adopters first before expanding to a wider audience, all while maintaining consistent messaging.
Premium relevance through DeepContext
Launching a flagship smartphone means competing for attention in one of digital advertising's most crowded categories. Samsung wanted to ensure its messaging appeared alongside content that naturally reinforced innovation, technology, lifestyle, and premium experiences.
To achieve this, the campaign used the AI-powered DeepContext solution.
We chose the Eskimi DeepContext solution to ensure higher quality, more relevant ad placements in a highly competitive and fragmented digital environment. Advanced contextual targeting allowed us to move beyond standard placements by analyzing page content in detail and aligning ads with premium, brand-suitable environments, shared Nemanja Milenković.
Rather than relying solely on traditional contextual signals, DeepContext analyzed webpage meaning, sentiment, and relevance to identify environments that reflected Samsung's premium positioning.
The Brand Blueprint focused on contextual themes including:
- Tech enthusiast engagement: Consumer technology and gadget reviews, smartphone innovation and buying guides.
- Home integration focus: Smart home and connected living.
- Entertainment alignment: Entertainment and premium viewing experiences.
- Active lifestyle connection: Sports, fitness, and active lifestyles.
DeepContext evaluated millions of URLs across the same core premium publishers, shifting impressions dynamically away from negative narratives and hard product repairs, placing them instead where the audience was most receptive.
Driving engagement with Rich Media
For a flagship smartphone launch, standard display formats alone were not enough to communicate Samsung's product innovation. Samsung used interactive Rich Media formats to highlight the Galaxy S26 premium features and encourage deeper engagement.
Rich media formats were selected to maximize attention and better showcase the key features of the Galaxy S26 in a highly competitive launch environment. These formats enabled immersive, interactive storytelling, allowing users to engage with the product in a more dynamic way compared to standard display, stated Nemanja Milenković.
Premium context that delivers measurable results
Across the three Adriatic markets, the Samsung Galaxy S26 campaign delivered more than 5 million impressions and reached 2.4 million users, successfully combining scale with strong engagement.
Serbia recorded the strongest user response, achieving the highest CTR (1.62%) and Engagement Rate (25.44%). Croatia delivered the largest campaign reach while maintaining strong CTR and Viewability, while Slovenia achieved the highest Viewability (77.28%), demonstrating excellent ad visibility despite a smaller campaign scale.
To evaluate the impact of AI-powered contextual targeting, Samsung compared DeepContext with a standard campaign approach across all three markets. The results showed that DeepContext consistently improved both media quality and campaign performance:
- 29% higher average CTR, increasing from 1.6% to 2.1%
- 20% higher regional Brand Safety, improving from 81.3% to 97.5%
- 1.6% higher average Viewability, increasing from 77.2% to 78.4%
- 14% higher regional Engagement Rate, improving from 13.45% to 15.33%
The campaign delivered strong results across all key performance metrics, with consistent improvements in CTR, engagement, and brand safety. DeepContext outperformed standard targeting across all three markets, enabling us to achieve stronger campaign performance while ensuring delivery in premium, contextually relevant environments, explained Nemanja Milenković.
By combining AI-powered contextual targeting with interactive Rich Media, Samsung ensured that every impression delivered both relevance and impact. The campaign proved that premium creative performs even better when it appears in contextually relevant environments.
Creative execution with Eskimi was efficient and flexible. The ability to combine advanced targeting with adaptable creatives allowed for consistent execution while tailoring messaging to different audiences and campaign phases, added Nemanja Milenković.
