Roadshow review: Samsung Galaxy AI Bus Tour Summer 2024
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This summer The Samsung Galaxy AI Bus Tour has been unmissable. There have been two double deckers on tour. Bus One finished its tour in London this month, whilst Bus Two still has a few more dates left, currently visiting Freshers events at university before culminating at a busy city centre location with dates up to 6th October.
The dual tours have reached all parts of the UK and Ireland. They have been delivered for Samsung by agency Blue Square.
This tour is indelibly linked with FMBE Magazine and Awards as the agency won our shopping centre/roadshow category last year, a category that lead sponsor SpaceandPeople added extra value to with an incredible £25,000 to spend at any Network Rail promotional location.
That win helped Bus One finish with a flourish in London, choosing King’s Cross as the location to ‘spend’ this voucher.
Not only that but Blue Square has been supporting Frank Wainwright’s Big TOE, the Tour of England. The 62-day, 1971-mile ultramarathon coincided with the Samsung Galaxy AI Bus Tour when he ran into the Bullring Brimingham. This was another location resourced by SpaceandPeople and hailed, back in August, by Blue Square, as one of the best locations chosen for the tour.
The scale of this tour has certainly been extensive. Focussing on the culmination of Tour One, Andrew Bodwick, Head of Brand, SpaceandPeople commented:
“It’s been amazing to work with Blue Square on their epic roadshow supporting Samsung. Tour One spanned over 3 months, with 21 stops and 82 live days. They were particularly excited to activate at London King’s Cross Station where they used their prize for winning the Most Effective Roadshow or Shopping Centre Campaign Award at the 2023 FMBE Awards!”
Event Review: Samsung Galaxy AI Bus Tour Summer 2024
The base concept here, take a big visible bus on a big visible tour and educate consumers about new consumer electronics developments is one of those operations that are frequently seen at FMBE.
That shouldn’t matter if the concept works and is even better if you can devise a way to get the very best out of it. And for a high end, tech invested brand like Samsung there are major advantages.
The logic is hard to argue against. A bus is logistically great for touring in, packs up relatively easily and is highly visible and intriguing. It is also a secure space for a controlled amount of hands-on demos, whilst allowing the products themselves to be the star of the show. Across 2 floors there is enough space for an experiential journey. There are no competing brands in the same location as there would be in store.
This was the best version of this concept that I have seen. The main reason for that – a great brand ambassadors coupled with very intelligent use space.
In one of the video reviews of this tour the reviewer “Cain Aiden Travels” referred to being guided by a Samsung Technician and I thought was a great inadvertent compliment to the Blue Square staff. My own guide Danie McIntyre was pitch perfect, taking me through the experience whilst listening to a reacting to my lifestyle requirements. She immediately noted that I was a Samsung user and tailored my experience towards getting the most from a proposed new handset rather than helping me to learn the system from the ground up.
Whilst attending to her advice I also had half an ear listening out to the experiences of other guests, and everyone was getting a different one. My interest in any handset relates to robustness, photography, video editing and reporting and this was the experience that I got, learning new shortcuts to get through my camera options more quickly and learning new AI shortcuts. It was impressive to understand that many of the apps I had downloaded enhance my photo manipulation on my existing phones had been provided as standard on the new Galaxy Z Fold. These folding phones had previously appealed to me… having one in May hands gave me confidence that it could survive the move-record-photo- go requirements of a runner-writer-reporter.
Danie and I moved from zone to zone in the bus pretty seamlessly. I actually don’t know if there were AI vacuum cleaners on my bus or not. I saw them on Cain Aiden’s review and heard about them from the King’s Cross experience. Whether they were added later in the tour or whether Dani decided my time was best spent engrossed in the Z Fold, I don’t know. I found her insights and delivery so engaging I was happy to stay with my personalised story.
That said, before getting hands on with the Z Fold, I had also enjoyed hearing about the Galaxy Ring “a smart ring that uses AI to track activity and sleep”. Danie noted the smart watch that I was already wearing as she showed me this new product. It does the same job and more, but it isn’t really that comfortable to wear at night. “Do you wear your watch at night?”, she asked me. “No, I confessed, I don’t like to wear it?” Danie knew that as a multiday ultrarunner, sleep patterns and recovery are important to me. The Ring is a bit of a luxury on my budget, but nevertheless currently under consideration.
