“He said no more than he said yes,” Brian recalled. “He wouldn’t
compromise. He would keep the pressure on. The positive pressure always
produced great work.”
Sometimes he’d push everyone to think about the most outlandish things
they could achieve in the world of advertising, no matter how silly or crazy.
Some of the team’s ideas—like a plan to remove the letter H from the
Hollywood sign and float it down the Mississippi River—were exactly that.
“How much would it take to get that spot?” Brian once asked Pendleton
as they stood in Times Square looking up at the glowing neon display
screens.
“What would it take to get all of them?” Todd said. They went back to
the office to figure it out. Later Samsung actually did do a momentary
Times Square takeover of all display signage that was available, though
Todd’s team didn’t oversee it.
And Brian Wallace’s role on the team?
“At Samsung, there’s always a guy who goes and yells at people. He was
not really a pleasant guy to work for. Brian was actually cut from a very
good Korean cloth,” said a marketer on the team. But he added, “That was
Brian’s strength.”
Todd’s inaugural marketing team was “a start-up with the billion-dollar
backing of a major corporation,” said one colleague. The team was
dysfunctional, in her eyes, but in a way that somehow worked.
“You could be partying with Jay-Z one day and then getting audited by
the South Korean headquarters the next. You’d stay up forty-eight hours
straight getting your ass kicked.”
The two marketing executives brought aboard thirty-six marketers and
treated the office as a black-box operation. “We had to be somewhat
insular to be able to pull some of this stuff off,” said a team member. They
were worried about meddling from South Korea’s bureaucracy. Dale
provided air cover from headquarters, giving them an unusual degree of
latitude and space to get their work done.
Then, just as they got started, Dale informed them that five years was
too long a time period to overtake Apple. Dale shortened the time frame to
two years, on orders from Samsung headquarters. In fact, the team
completed their work in eighteen months.