Samsung Bets on Galaxy S9 Camera to Change How France Shares
Samsung's #DoItBetter campaign is a narrative film created by Paris agency Willie Beamen, published in France in August 2018, designed to demonstrate how the Galaxy S9's photographic capabilities could elevate the quality of everyday social-media content shared by consumers.
The campaign centres on a single film asset, structured around a compressed portrait of social-media photography's evolution over approximately ten years. Rather than cataloguing hardware specifications, the creative premise anchors the Galaxy S9 inside a cultural story — the restless human desire to document and share life more vividly. According to willie-beamen.com, the agency described the Galaxy S9 as a "game changer" and framed the work around showing audiences how the device could improve the content they create and circulate across social platforms. That positioning is deliberate: it moves Samsung out of the specification arms race and into a conversation about creative self-expression.
In France, where smartphone penetration and social-media engagement were both climbing steadily through 2018, the timing of the August launch aligned the campaign with late-summer consumer activity and the anticipation preceding major autumn retail cycles. The French market context matters because Willie Beamen is a Paris-based agency, and the campaign record specifically identifies France as the primary geography, per Clapboard's archive. While the archive notes a broader ambition, no independent source confirms a verified global rollout beyond this French market placement.
The Clapboard Score for #DoItBetter is 63 out of 100, a rating that reflects competent strategic thinking and a coherent creative concept, tempered by limited public documentation of measurable outcomes and the single-asset nature of the release.
Samsung held first position in global smartphone market share in 2018 at approximately 20.8%, down from 21.7% the previous year, according to 247wallst.com. That erosion arrived in a year when global smartphone shipments fell approximately 4.1% year over year — the market's worst annual performance to that point — also per 247wallst.com. In France, that broader contraction created pressure on every premium handset maker to justify upgrade cycles with something more compelling than incremental processor gains.
The strategic response Willie Beamen constructed for Samsung was to bypass the spec sheet entirely and compete on cultural relevance. Apple, Samsung's most direct competitor in the premium segment, had built its own camera-led marketing around the long-running Shot on iPhone franchise, which had already established a template for user-generated visual storytelling as a brand asset. Huawei, expanding aggressively into European markets including France during this period, was simultaneously challenging Samsung on both price and camera performance. Against those two competitive forces, #DoItBetter needed to do more than demonstrate image quality — it needed to claim a narrative territory.
Willie Beamen's answer was to make the film about the cultural arc of social-media content itself, positioning the Galaxy S9 not as a better camera but as the tool that arrives at the moment when better is finally possible. According to willie-beamen.com, the agency had previously worked with Samsung on campaigns for two consecutive Olympic Games before this assignment, a lineage that gave the creative team an established understanding of how to connect Samsung hardware to large human stories. That institutional knowledge shapes the ambition visible in #DoItBetter: it reaches for cultural meaning rather than product demonstration.
Louis de Caunes directed #DoItBetter for Samsung, with production handled by company Standard, according to adforum.com. Creative direction was shared between Nicolas Moreau and Damien Real at Willie Beamen, also per adforum.com. The campaign was announced on July 3, 2018, ahead of its August publication in France, suggesting a production and post-production timeline consistent with a tightly scheduled summer release.
The film's structural choice is its most distinctive craft decision. Rather than constructing a conventional product demonstration or a series of vignette testimonials, the narrative compresses approximately a decade of social-media photography into a single continuous story. That compression serves two functions simultaneously: it flatters the audience by acknowledging how far their visual culture has already travelled, and it positions the Galaxy S9 as the logical next instrument for that journey. The editorial rhythm required to make a decade legible within a short-form film format demands precise control of pacing — a challenge that falls equally on de Caunes's direction and on the editing craft applied in post.
Paris, as both the agency's home and a city with strong visual culture associations, likely informed the aesthetic register of the work. In France, where cinema and visual arts carry particular cultural weight, a film that takes photography seriously as a subject — rather than merely as a product feature — carries additional resonance. The single-asset approach concentrates all creative investment into one piece, which raises the stakes for execution quality while limiting the campaign's ability to address multiple audience segments or platform contexts simultaneously. Within those constraints, the credited team built a film that functions as both a brand statement and a cultural observation.
No verified performance data for the #DoItBetter campaign is publicly available. No published sales lift, incremental revenue, market-share change, or independently audited audience metric has been attributed to this specific campaign in the French market or elsewhere. No recognised industry award — across Cannes Lions, Effies, The One Show, D&AD, Clios, Webby Awards, or WARC Awards — is recorded against this work.
Structural analysis provides a partial substitute for absent metrics. The campaign's decision to lead with narrative rather than product specification aligns with evidence from brand-building research that emotional storytelling generates stronger long-term brand equity than rational persuasion — particularly in premium technology categories where consumers already assume baseline quality. In France, where Samsung faced simultaneous pressure from Apple's entrenched premium positioning and Huawei's price-competitive camera offering, a film that anchors the Galaxy S9 inside a decade-long cultural story is a defensible strategic choice even without measurable short-term activation data.
The single-asset format limits scalability but concentrates creative impact. Willie Beamen's prior relationship with Samsung across two Olympic Games campaigns, as noted by willie-beamen.com, suggests the agency had earned sufficient trust to attempt a more culturally ambitious register. Whether that ambition translated into measurable commercial movement in the French market remains undocumented. The Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100 reflects exactly this tension: a campaign with coherent strategic intent and credible creative craft, operating without the independent verification that would confirm its effectiveness.
Samsung's #DoItBetter is a narrative film campaign created by Paris agency Willie Beamen and published in France in August 2018. The film positions the Galaxy S9 as the tool that enables better social-media photography by compressing approximately a decade of social-media content evolution into a single continuous story, according to willie-beamen.com.
Willie Beamen, a Paris-based agency, created #DoItBetter for Samsung. The agency had previously worked with Samsung on two consecutive Olympic Games campaigns, per willie-beamen.com, establishing creative familiarity with the brand before taking on this Galaxy S9 film for the French market in 2018.
Louis de Caunes directed the #DoItBetter film, with production by company Standard, according to adforum.com. Creative directors Nicolas Moreau and Damien Real led the work at Willie Beamen. The campaign was announced on July 3, 2018, ahead of its August publication in France.
#DoItBetter promotes the Samsung Galaxy S9 smartphone. The creative premise focuses specifically on the Galaxy S9's photographic capabilities, framing the device as a tool that allows consumers to improve the visual content they create and share on social media, as described by willie-beamen.com.
No verified award for #DoItBetter has been recorded across Cannes Lions, Effies, The One Show, D&AD, Clios, Webby Awards, or WARC Awards, per Clapboard's archive research. The campaign holds a Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100, reflecting coherent creative intent without independently confirmed industry recognition.
Apple's Shot on iPhone franchise established camera-led user-generated storytelling as a competitive benchmark in 2018. Samsung's #DoItBetter responds with a narrative film rather than user-generated content, positioning the Galaxy S9 culturally rather than technically — a distinct strategic choice for the French premium smartphone market during a year of declining global shipments, per 247wallst.com.
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