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Samsung Builds a Fictional Town to Sell Solid State Drives
Samsung's 'Welcome to Solid State' is a May 2019 digital campaign created by London agency BMB, in partnership with Cheil Worldwide, for the United Kingdom market, using an animated fictional town styled as a mid-century American destination to dramatise the speed, durability, and portability of Samsung's Solid State Drive product range, according to Adsoftheworld.
The campaign launched in the United Kingdom as BMB's first creative output for Samsung following the agency's appointment to the brand's roster in January 2019, as documented by Clapboard, according to Moreaboutadvertising. Rather than cataloguing technical specifications, the creative approach personified Samsung's SSD products as inhabitants of 'Solid State', a fictional retro-styled community in which every visual detail reflected a distinct product benefit, according to Semiconductor Samsung. Speed, durability, performance, and portability each found physical expression within the town's architecture, characters, and atmosphere.
The campaign's media plan ran for eight weeks, extending through approximately mid-July 2019, according to Clapboard. Distribution was concentrated across Samsung's owned social channels in the United Kingdom — specifically Samsung SSD's Facebook account and Samsung Memory's Instagram account — making it a precision digital campaign rather than a broadcast-first push. The full suite of creative assets comprised one 60-second animated film, five shorter edits, and fourteen stills, as documented by Clapboard. Products featured across the campaign included the Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus, 860 EVO, Portable SSD T5, Portable SSD X5, and 860 QVO, per Clapboard. The Clapboard Score for this campaign is 67 out of 100.
The consumer storage market presents a distinctive creative challenge. SSD products are defined by performance metrics — read and write speeds, NAND architecture, thermal management — that mean a great deal to enthusiast buyers and comparatively little to a broader technology-curious audience. Samsung's brief to BMB acknowledged this tension directly, and the resulting strategy replaced specification-led communication with experiential metaphor.
In the United Kingdom, the consumer electronics sector was highly competitive in 2019, with Apple, Huawei, LG Electronics, Sony, and Xiaomi all identified as principal Samsung competitors, according to Clapboard. Apple in particular represented Samsung's most prominent high-end rival in devices that increasingly relied on fast internal storage as a headline consumer feature. By building a campaign around the feeling that SSD technology produces — a sense of entering a faster, more responsive world — BMB positioned Samsung's Solid State Drive range as an aspirational lifestyle upgrade rather than a hardware component, according to Digitimes.
Concentrating distribution on Samsung's owned social channels in the United Kingdom reflected a deliberate targeting decision. Facebook and Instagram audiences for technology-brand accounts skew toward existing brand affinity, meaning the campaign could presuppose baseline brand familiarity and invest creative energy in deepening product understanding rather than building awareness from scratch. The eight-week run, as reported by Clapboard, gave the full asset library — anchored by the 60-second film and supported by five shorter edits and fourteen stills — sufficient time to achieve meaningful frequency across those audiences without media spend on broader broadcast placements.
Animation drove the entire creative logic of the campaign. BMB's Chief Creative Officer Matt Lever stated, as quoted in More About Advertising on 30 May 2019, that the team was 'dramatising the benefits of the product by literally showing our target market the incredible place that the product can take you to, in an entertaining way that eschews the technical nature of the category.' That stated intent shapes every production decision visible in the finished work.
The fictional town of 'Solid State' is rendered in a mid-century American visual idiom — a deliberate stylistic choice that evokes optimism, modernity-as-nostalgia, and a sense of a world operating at its ideal best. Each SSD product in the Samsung range is represented as a character or presence within the town, with the environment itself functioning as an extended metaphor for the performance qualities the product delivers. The approach allowed the creative team to communicate durability, portability, and speed without a single frame of benchmark data.
Creative direction was led by Philly Byrne, with art direction handled by Andrea Locci and Sef Tedder, and copy written by Seb Howling and Joseph Keirs, as documented by Ads of the World and Clapboard. The campaign was produced in partnership with Cheil Worldwide, Samsung's longstanding global agency partner, giving BMB's independent creative thinking structural support from an agency with deep institutional knowledge of the Samsung brand, according to News Samsung. Production credits for the animation studio and director are not fully documented in publicly available sources. The asset architecture — one hero film, five short edits, and fourteen stills — was engineered for social platform behaviour, with shorter cuts designed to function independently as scroll-stopping content across Samsung's United Kingdom Instagram and Facebook channels.
No verified performance data for 'Welcome to Solid State' is publicly available. Samsung has not published reach, engagement, or conversion metrics for this campaign in any source indexed by Clapboard, Ads of the World, or More About Advertising, and no third-party measurement reports have been attributed to it in the public domain.
Structural analysis, however, points to several strengths that would predictably support campaign effectiveness in the United Kingdom digital market. The decision to anchor distribution to owned social channels is inherently efficient: cost per impression on brand-owned accounts carries no media placement overhead, and the audience self-selects for brand relevance. The eight-week duration, as noted by Clapboard, is long enough to achieve meaningful frequency without creative fatigue, particularly given the variety within the asset library.
The animation format is well suited to social feed environments. It differentiates visually from live-action technology advertising — a category dominated by sleek product cinematography — and the mid-century aesthetic gives the campaign a distinctive identity that aids recall. The decision to avoid technical specifications removes a common barrier in electronics advertising, where jargon can create distance between a product and a non-specialist audience. By making the experience of SSD performance the subject of the film rather than its architecture, BMB gave Samsung a creative platform accessible to anyone curious about faster, more reliable storage. The Clapboard Score of 67 out of 100 reflects a campaign that executes its creative concept with clarity and craft while operating within a relatively contained media footprint.
'Welcome to Solid State' is a May 2019 UK digital campaign created by BMB for Samsung. It used an animated fictional mid-century town to dramatise the benefits of Samsung's Solid State Drive range. The campaign ran for eight weeks across Samsung's Facebook and Instagram channels, comprising one 60-second film, five edits, and fourteen stills, according to Clapboard.
BMB, the London-based independent agency, created the campaign in partnership with Cheil Worldwide. BMB was appointed to Samsung's roster in January 2019, and 'Welcome to Solid State' was the agency's first work for the brand, as documented by Clapboard. Creative direction was led by Chief Creative Officer Matt Lever and Creative Director Philly Byrne.
The campaign featured five Samsung products: the SSD 970 EVO Plus, 860 EVO, Portable SSD T5, Portable SSD X5, and 860 QVO. Each product was represented as a character or presence within the fictional town of Solid State, with the environment reflecting distinct performance qualities, according to Clapboard.
The campaign ran exclusively in the United Kingdom, launching in May 2019 and running for eight weeks through approximately mid-July 2019. Distribution was limited to Samsung's owned social channels — Samsung SSD's Facebook account and Samsung Memory's Instagram account — making it a precision digital campaign rather than a broad media buy, per Clapboard.
BMB used animation to avoid the technical language that dominates electronics advertising. As Chief Creative Officer Matt Lever stated in More About Advertising in May 2019, the goal was to show audiences the 'incredible place' the product can take them, in an entertaining way that deliberately sidesteps the category's technical nature. Animation made that metaphor visually achievable.
The Clapboard Score for 'Welcome to Solid State' is 67 out of 100. The score reflects a campaign that communicates its central concept with creative clarity and strong craft, particularly in its use of animation and fictional world-building, while operating within a relatively contained owned-media footprint rather than a broad paid distribution strategy.
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