and a half months.
The work of the marketers at Samsung was frustratingly subpar.
Samsung didn’t use people in its commercials—“just product and voiceover
and talking about the product benefit,” Todd Pendleton said. Rather than
pitch consumers on why Samsung was great, marketing stories were framed
around the telecom carriers—“telling a story around their network and why
their network is great.”
The South Korean headquarters, meanwhile, sent over goofy and
culturally inappropriate commercials that incited rebellion among the
Americans on staff.
“They wanted us to use butterflies,” said former marketing vice
president Clyde Roberson. He called the ads “Hello Kitty.”
“One commercial showed a woman in the mountains, surrounded by a
flower bed, spinning around and holding a phone that blossomed into
flower. It was reminiscent of The Sound of Music,” said Bill Ogle, former
CMO. The American team refused to run it.
The South Koreans’ respect for rank, prestige, and luxury didn’t always
translate well into the American market. Proposed spots out of Seoul that
were designed for the Asian market tended to showcase “trendy, Eurotrash,
rich, white people...that have a certain look and feel,” explained a Samsung
marketer. The marketing team in Texas worried about the potential
blowback in the United States. U.S. ads, ideally, would have “a sense of
humor” and would be “hipsterish”—an art that Apple had mastered.
Pendleton and Wallace quickly got to work. “At Samsung, you had one
day to get settled in,” said another marketer on the team. They acted like
good cop and bad cop, visionary and executor, with Todd bouncing ideas
back and forth with his team and Brian doing the managing and yelling to
make them happen.
“Todd’s strengths are that he’s an extremely good marketer in terms of
creative,” said a marketer who worked for him. “He wasn’t great at
managing people day to day in the corporate bureaucracy.”