Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., a market leader in consumer electronics and the Worldwide Olympic Partner for Wireless Communications Equipment, on May 3 announced an exclusive agreement with David Beckham to be its global brand ambassador for the London 2012 Olympic Games. Beckham will begin his ambassador role with immediate effect and will play a key part in raising awareness of Samsung’s sponsorship of London 2012 as a Worldwide Olympic Partner. The collaboration will start with appearances in multi-platform adverts and public relations campaigns, covering various elements of Samsung’s London 2012 marketing programme.

Now, with AR being probably the most powerful advertising tool in the set of ‘reality’ features used for promotion, let’s look back at another, traditional ‘reality’ promotional approach, which still works perfectly. TV commercials with their made-up plots, characters and dialogues can appeal for sure, but genuine emotions of real people are much more convincing. Building on the success of extremely popular reality programs, brands launch their own initiatives of this kind to entertain and educate audience while spreading the word about the goods—some of these projects are grandiose, the others are small-scale, but this format never leaves consumers untouched.

In the third and the final chapter of our Brands and the City overview, we focused on brands’ projects which helped enrich city canvas and add more elements to the metropolitan life. Here we collected both projects with a social twist, revolving around the idea of making a city a better place to live, and works with a vivid advertising component, such as branded bus shelters, giant interactive billboards and shop windows, which broadened physical borders of the cities.

The brands which know secrets of viral advertising win people’s hearts. This year, the range of public favorites included know-all Isaiah Mustafa holding a bottle of Old Spice shower gel, a guy in Levi’s jeans who embarked on a trip across America, sport celebrities commissioned by Nike to star in spots about their future and many more. Let’s look back to explore which videos, to our mind, were the most contagious this year.

Samsung collaborated with The Viral Factory to develop two projects, revolving around durability of the manufacturer’s SD memory cards. The first one is a promotional film, which proves that the product is ‘magnet-proof, shockproof and waterproof’ by testing it in the harshest environments imaginable, and the second one is an unprecedented initiative, under which the cards will be send into the stratosphere.

The idea of promoting products through a series of reality-TV episodes was recently employed by Philips and became the basis of its romantic online-only comedy videos to preview a series of new range. The concept is now taken up by another global company, Samsung, which has launched a website called SmartnSimple.tv to spread the word about its domestic appliances and offer internet-savvy UK consumers lots of ‘smart and simple’ tips on how to turn daily routine into enjoyable experience.

Samsung has created a new viral video, which focuses equally on the brand’s products and on music. The company teamed up with OK, a popular viral band with a plethora of fans, to help them create a new clip for their single «Last Leaf,» from the album «Colour Of The Blue Of The Sky» using its new camera Samsung NX100. Along with the new video, they launched an interactive online hub and a series of 5 episodes describing how the clip was made and inspiring others to make their own crazy things just like they did.

Samsung Electronics Australia has started a major new marketing campaign in the digital and social media space, entitled “Mr Knowitall”, to educate consumers on the benefits of its innovative integrated social messaging service, Samsung Social Hub. Available on its two recently launched smartphones; the Samsung Wave and Samsung Galaxy S, the campaign is a first-of-its-kind online experience that demonstrates how the comedic character, Mr Knowitall, knows everything about everyone in his social circle all thanks to information he has gleaned from using Samsung Social Hub.