Todd’s team chose 72andSunny specifically for its edginess. On a
conference call with 72andSunny, he laid out Samsung’s goal, as handed
down by Dale Sohn.
“I expect us to be number one in a couple years.”
John Boiler called the goal “laughable.” Samsung, after all, was a speck
on the smartphone radar. But, Boiler recounted, one important ingredient to
success was “high pressure.”
“We had to get concepts to Todd in four days and we had to produce
[the campaign] in two weeks,” he said. “We got it, and we nailed it out of
the gates because we were fighting mean and lean.”
Pendleton needed to move quickly to promote the upcoming Galaxy S
II under Samsung’s demanding time line. He assigned Joanne Lovato
(known to colleagues as Jo), a California native and UCLA graduate, to
coordinate with 72andSunny and the other agencies.
They worked to inject more life into Samsung’s engineering jargon
describing new products. A few weeks before each product launch, the
team would receive a thick technical tome consisting of hundreds of pages.
They had to tear through it, decipher it into everyday language, and select
the top six or seven features to promote to consumers. Then, without being
allowed to see the new phone before the launch, they’d crunch the
engineering-speak into a PowerPoint presentation called a “product
positioning document,” which they’d present to the agency.
Both Samsung’s team and 72andSunny were always racing the clock.
Product unveilings, called “Unpacked” events, were typically held in March
or April. The engineering manual arrived in February. Three times a week,
Jo held a teleconference with the agencies to ensure everything was on
track.
Short on time and eager to create commercials immediately after
Apple’s iPhone product unveilings, Pendleton decided that the actors they
hired for commercials would ad-lib their parts, rather than go through a
longer, more structured creative process.
The creative executives at 72andSunny got to work and churned out
their first approach for Pendleton, who was present at the shoots and the
editing, eager to maintain his creative hand. In one early version of a
commercial, two characters waiting in line outside an Apple store had a
conversation about the features and quality of their Apple and Samsung
phones, followed by a cut to another scene of two characters talking about