“There’s no substitute for a constant stream of bigger and better new
products,” a Samsung line manager later told him. “Money spent on R&D is
always a better investment than money spent on advertising.”
Kim stayed the course, bringing together a global marketing budget of
$1 billion under his Global Marketing Operations (GMO) unit and a $400
million advertising budget—a big account but not an endless amount,
considering all the products and divisions he had to advertise—and he
ordered an ad agency review. He also ended the practice of setting
marketing budgets at a percentage of current sales—which encouraged
employees to work for the here and now—and began setting the marketing
budget to “potential sales.” That would force them to think of the long
view.
Next he had to forge an overarching Samsung marketing identity.
“Products don’t sell themselves,” he told me.
He enlisted Peter Arnell to help.
“We had a brainstorming [session] at this office, and then we had a
dinner,” said Kim’s marketer Thomas Rhee. “Sometimes Peter said, ‘Oh, I
got an idea!’ and scribbled it on a napkin at a restaurant.” He recalled that
Kim and Arnell wanted a slogan with a sense of novelty, excitement,
inclusion, and optimism as the millennium approached.
“Digital” was the buzzword of the era. Arnell scribbled variations on his
napkin. He added an L to digital. The result? “DigitAll.”
“A lot of ideas started on the back of a napkin,” Thomas Rhee recalled.
Eric Kim was pleased. He settled on the new campaign, which would
last for years to come: DigitAll: Everyone’s Invited.
—
ARNELL DIDN’T CONTINUE WORKING with Samsung much longer. Samsung
was looking for a break from what one consultant jokingly called his “soft
porno.” One television ad showed an almost-nude woman caressing a
sculpted male model on her television set to the music of a seductive
electric guitar.
“I love my TV. It’s Samsung,” she said in an erotic embrace.
Kim’s DigitAll campaign was unleashed on November 10, 1999,
steamrolling over Arnell’s earlier campaigns, blaring out Samsung’s new
mission: “to integrate digital home, mobile and personal multimedia on a