powerful wave of positive publicity.
Forbes described the ad as “a barrage of not-so-subtle jabs at competitor
Apple Inc.”
Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president for marketing, was livid at
Samsung’s marketing campaign. He shot an email to Apple’s ad agency,
TBWA\Chiat\Day, with a link to the Wall Street Journal article.
“We have a lot of work to do to turn this around,” he wrote. He emailed
Apple CEO Tim Cook that Apple “may need to start a search for a new
agency.”
“We feel it too and it hurts,” wrote an advertising executive at TBWA
back to Schiller. “We understand that this moment is pretty close to 1997 in
terms of the need for advertising to help pull Apple through this moment.”
Schiller blew up at the response.
“To come back and suggest that Apple needs to think dramatically
different about how we are running our company is a shocking response,”
he wrote.
“In 1997 Apple had no products to market. We had a company making
so little money that we were 6 months from out of business....Not the
world’s most successful tech company. Not the company that everybody
wants to copy and compete with.”
Samsung’s Super Bowl ad was “pretty good,” Schiller went on, “and I
can’t help but think these guys [TBWA] are feeling it, like an athlete who
can’t miss because they are in the zone while we struggle to nail a
compelling brief on iPhone.”
In response to Samsung’s new marketing savvy around new releases of
its Galaxy phones, Apple seemed to follow Samsung’s lead in terms of new
products, expanding Apple’s limited lines to include bigger screens,
additional sizes of iPhones, and more variety for a wider swath of
customers.
“Consumers want what we don’t have,” read a gloomy Apple
presentation slide in February 2013, lamenting that growth was slowing,
that people were crying for bigger screen sizes. It was an idea that Samsung
had pioneered.
Advertising at Apple, too, needed a reboot. As Pendleton was
lampooning Apple, the company had already been releasing commercials
around the “Genius Bar,” featuring a feisty, squeaky-voiced fix-it geek