“Dude, you’re a barista.”
“It’s a Galaxy S II. This phone is amazing,” says the Samsung guy,
showing off his smartphone before getting into a taxi, bidding farewell to
the crowd of Apple zombies.
The message? You don’t need to wait in line. You don’t need to follow
the hype.
“The Next Big Thing Is Already Here,” the commercial finishes.
“God damn!” Todd exclaimed after looking at it. “We’ve got a
campaign!”
Pendleton’s staff sent the commercial to South Korea for approval. Five
days later, they’d still heard nothing back. At six o’clock on day five, Dale
Sohn stood up, put on his jacket, and got ready to go home, before leaving
a word of advice on the silence from Seoul.
“It means they’ve given you enough rope to hang yourself,” Sohn said.
It was up to Todd’s team to make the leap and take the risk. And if it
failed, they’d have to answer for it.
They proceeded to leak the film to the popular tech and culture website
Mashable, which unveiled it on November 22, 2011, before Samsung
posted it “officially” on its Facebook page later that day. Pendleton was
abandoning the marketing world’s older, more vanilla strategy of going
through print and TV news outlets, opting for the Web first, appealing to
millennials. Then, on Thanksgiving weekend, the commercial debuted in
minute-long spots during the NFL games.
The campaign was a phenomenal success, beyond anything the team
had anticipated; Samsung had hit precisely the sweet spot, with viewers
responding that they were tired of swallowing what they thought was
Apple’s unjustified pretentiousness. The commercial transformed Samsung
Telecommunications America into one of the fastest-growing brands on
Facebook, with more than 26 million fans in sixteen months.
“We are the fastest-growing brand globally on Twitter, with almost two
million followers,” Pendleton later recounted at a press conference.
“Get ready to take out your designer pitchforks, Macheads. Your
hipness is under attack as we speak,” joked CBS’s Chenda Ngak.
During the third quarter of 2011, Samsung surged past Apple to the
number one spot among phone manufacturers, based on shipments. No
longer was the smartphone war a battle between Apple and a tangle of