of creating “cultural moments,” as he put it, was novel—“being in places
that are culturally relevant to consumers here in the U.S.” He would use a
mixture of planning and improvisation, rather than a rigid hierarchical
approach, to craft those cultural moments.
For two decades, Todd had learned the art of cultural branding in high-
profile negotiations with basketball players and other sports stars. Samsung,
in many ways, was butting up against the same challenges that had afflicted
Nike and Reebok in the 1980s and 1990s: too much focus on engineering,
and not enough focus on clever marketing that “knits the whole
organization together,” as Nike co-founder Phil Knight put it. Each year the
big shoe makers put out catalogs full of ribbed ankle collars, textured
fabrics, and CO2-filled bladders of cushioning, which appealed to serious
athletes and shoe nerds but were seen as gimmicks by consumers, fads that
came and went. A relentless race to release new, innovative shoes in high
volumes drew Nike into a price war.
“We were trying to create a brand...but also a culture,” Knight wrote in
his memoir Shoe Dog. “More than a product, we were trying to sell an idea
—a spirit.” That was the recruiting pitch to Rob Strasser, the lawyer who
would join Nike—a struggling company—and then approach a relatively
untested basketball player named Michael Jordan to convince him to sign a
five-year contract worth $2.5 million.
The first Air Jordan shoes, released in 1984, made $130 million in
revenue in their first year for Nike and three decades later still had eight
times the sales of Nike’s newer signature line, the LeBron James Collection.
It was a masterstroke of symbiosis: Jordan made Nike, and Nike—through
cultural branding—helped make Jordan.
By the time Todd joined Nike as a baby-faced advertising manager in
1996, just a few years out of Northeastern University in Boston, Nike
dominated the cool factor in shoes and sports clothing. The swoosh and
“Just Do It” were not yet annoying corporate sloganeering—they were
entries into the pop-culture canon.
Todd spent the next fifteen years as one of the architects of some of
Nike’s iconic campaigns, helping guide the company into the post-Jordan
world as His Airness prepared to retire in early 1999. In 2002 Todd, after
his success working on an iconic Nike basketball commercial called
“Freestyle,” was promoted to become the company’s first-ever basketball
brand manager, giving him more power to sign stars. Nike was seeking a