A Passion For Storytelling That Sells - Samsung's Annika Bizon

Alongside its flip phones, HD TVs, and numerous tech products, Samsung UK has been steadily growing an affinity with skateboarding as it taps into skater culture and the amazing stunts and tricks that can be recorded via its phones and shared around the globe.

Under Annika Bizon, VP of product and marketing for Mobile Experience at Samsung UK & Ireland, the mobile phone company is providing creators with the ability to plan, record, and share videos with the world – bringing it into the world of entertainment. And that’s no accident; Bizon, who was promoted earlier this year, held senior roles at 20th Century Fox and Three UK, having begun her commercial career at Universal Pictures. She has also served on the advisory board for Meta UK for nearly three years.

Samsung's support of skateboarding has been in play for a few years, including working with British Olympian Sky Brown as Samsung grows its use of the creator economy to promote its hardware. Most recently, working with its creative agency Iris, Bizon oversaw the activation of the world’s first 25-hour skatepark alongside its new creative platform ‘Drop in with Samsung’, to showcase the capabilities of the new Galaxy S25.

She’s also a big believer in the data provided by Samsung’s health app on her phone to help her sleep - a particularly useful function given the high levels of travel she’s experiencing lately, everywhere from London to the company’s South Korean headquarters in Suwon.

Of course, when you talk to Bizon, the subject of AI comes up - it is one of the tech businesses’ core focuses of growth. “We’re already seeing an incredible response to Galaxy AI, and have committed to expanding Galaxy AI to 400 million devices by the end of this year,” reveals Bizon. “It’s a powerful signal that we believe AI is for everyone; it’s becoming a vital, integrated part of everyday life.”

A need for balance

Her grounding in entertainment fostered Bizon's love for creativity, even during a long period of focusing on the commercial sides of the business. And while it was the content that kept her motivated, she noted that people would always become more enthusiastic whenever she told them where she worked.

"That was where my passion started to move into marketing," she explains. "I went into commercial roles that managed marketing and sales, which gave me a different edge on things. I look at everything through a lens of, ‘What does it mean to the consumer? What makes sense? What resonates? What’s brand activity versus sales activity?' And because I’ve sat in all those seats, I probably have a slightly different perspective."

And while she has developed a passion for storytelling through marketing, she also recognises the importance of promotion and performance while having a balance with authentic creativity.

At Samsung, she has grasped onto the innovation produced by the company across its tech and the opportunity to excite consumers with those.

"We’re making a quite fundamental game change, and I get to talk to them about taking technology and creating experiences and understanding that's quite an exciting space," she says. "That is in the same way as when I go back to movies and telling stories and everything about a film or TV - it's all about telling stories. Someone gives me the script around what the product is, and I get to tell the story, right?"

Commenting on working with Bizon, Zoe Eagle, the CEO of Iris London, describes her as "an incredible marketing leader" who is capable of inspiring and retaining a focus on achieving maximum impact for Samsung while remaining grounded.

"She works with us as a true partner, leveraging our integrated structure masterfully to deliver participation and innovation across her business- the incredible impact of Samsung Skate being an awesome example of this," adds Eagle. "She also has more energy than anyone I have ever met in my life - climbing actual mountains in her spare time!"

The World of Marketing, according to Annika Bizon

When you're commissioning a campaign, having such an interest in the entertainment side of things, what is it you're looking for in the brief or the agency response?

It depends on what we’re taking to market. You’re going to take a very different point of view if you’re bringing a smartphone out or if you’re bringing out a Ring. Those things have different stories. But what I’m looking for is, first of all, we do a load of consumer research to understand what people actually want from a phone and what that means for the brand. The second thing is, how do we make that make sense, and which channels should we be talking about to in that space?

And we have to ask, “Are we marketing to ourselves?” And that can be brilliant because we know what we want to talk about, but are we genuinely interested in trying to solve problems? There are always problems, but where are we trying to solve? Is it people wanting more time? Phones are becoming more of a hub for how people live their lives, so do they want to do more with their phones? We have to be really connected to that space in the right way. That's what I try to think about – “Why would this not work?”

For Samsung as a brand, how do you maintain consistency across the work?

The innovation is the ethos of Samsung; it’s what people expect. So Samsung brings something out, and generally, the technology is incredible. My job is to take that technology and go, “How do I make this make sense to the consumer?” because sometimes we have so many features, so we need to decide “Which ones are we talking about, and are we talking to ourselves?” When you talk about the consistency of brand guidelines, we’ve got all the things you would expect, especially with more and more content going through content creators and in spaces that we wouldn’t have naturally used previously.

We we are trying to find genuinely authentic spaces which is why we are focusing on skateboarding. So, with skateboarding in the UK, we wanted to really get behind that for a number of reasons. One was, we know that it’s interesting to audiences which is interesting to us because it’s another space where we can have conversations through DJs and musicians too. Second, it’s an open sport and we’re an open brand. So how do we bring those two things together? Third is that skateboarders prop their phones up on branded trainers to play videos - we’ve got a phone that stands up. And the final thing is that people have to fail before you get a trick, but you’ve got to keep doing it before you film that and we love the art.

So, it all fits together. And then we asked, “How do we keep ourselves honest?’, “How do you stay on brand in this space?” and “How do we become a brand in this space?” So, we knew probably needed to get Skateboard GB involved to advise, because if we screw this up, we’ll lose the entire community. And that was one of the key things, to tell them, “If I start to do anything that you think is too ‘big brandy’ and it’s losing the consumer or turning them off, then you’ve got a right to tell us that’s not the right thing, and to tell the team, ‘don’t do it’. And we've now been accepted by skateboarders because they see that we’re not trying to ram our products down their throats. We’re helping the community. That's been a really personally interesting journey for me, because it’s shown me how to step back, let it roll, see what happens, and find our place. And it's shining through in the results dramatically, and we’re seeing a huge increase in engagement.

What have you learned about working with the creator economy?

We have Team Galaxy, and they are almost part of our family. They know more about the products that they're interested in, but they all have scale. And they've all got other businesses that we've helped with. One of them creates recycled skate parks, and so we asked ‘How do we help you build them?” They need to get grants and raise the funds to do it and we can help them quite quickly. Another one to works on grassroots in schools, so we asked “How do we open up spaces for people who have never skated?”, and I've got this vision one day that I will open up the Natural History Museum skateboard park. You'll see some of this coming through.

Most campaigns for your phones include some sort of AI functionality – how do you deliver those messages within the creative while people are still a little uncertain about that tech being on their phone?

It’s about normalising AI… but I think AI is a selling point in as much that it's doing things that give you features you didn't have in the past. So it's not about the AI. The AI's kind of irrelevant, but it's the feature you've got that is being powered by it. AI is not particularly new. AI has been optimising your battery in your phone for years. It's just now it's doing it in the consumer’s eyes far more and there's a lot more general hype around AI in every single business you could ever look at. It's the latest buzzword. AI in medicine, compared to what AI means in marketing is quite different.

When it comes to your agency partners, what do you say to them about using Gen AI?

So where we're going with AI right now is, I'm doing lots of testing around optimising content - some it AI, some it non AI stuff - and that's with the likes of Meta and Google. For me, I'm looking at the marketing function - how do we find efficiencies? That’s efficiencies around toolkits. How do I optimise the mundane stuff so I can get my team out of those spaces and into more creative spaces? And then couple that with the fact that I'm looking at things like even down to briefing processes. How do we take the people out of a briefing process and make it as simple as possible so we can start to brief quicker? And the better briefs that are getting across, how do we make those smarter, more intuitive, and faster so that my team will go and do other stuff?

Do you feel that’s happening yet?

A lot of it is and it's testing. I don't know what I don't know. And I'm learning, like everybody. Anybody who says “I know all the things that I think are true”, well you can't, because it's changing. What we're going to talk about today, compare that to what's probably going to come out in six months. 18 months is a long time as an horizon to talk about because in six months’ time, things could be completely different. And even people who are geniuses in AI are saying, “I don't know”. It's okay not to know, the direction you're going is the right way to go.

What, for you, is a good agency partner?

Number one is that they are a partner and it has to be a two-way conversation. They have to be able to call out when we're doing things that are not going to work, instead of following the tracks. The second thing I'd say is efficiency and effectiveness and I don’t just mean numeric efficiency. I mean they're efficient in terms of turning things around, and the effectiveness of what they're taking to market. Are they giving us better work, or are we briefing about products but not getting the best work? They need to get Samsung - we're a company that's got a lot of great products and a lot of quirks, so come with us on the journey, and understand that you have to be deeply ingrained in our business.