“[Tomio] had been at Donna Karan, where I was doing advertising
work,” advertising guru Peter Arnell told me from his scenic villa near
Rome, showing off the lush view and cylindrical green topiaries. “So
Tomio recommended me for the job with Samsung. Miky and I, we
became good friends.”
Peter was a rambunctious Madison Avenue advertising executive
known for his eccentric ideas and aggrandizing demeanor, who’d branded
Donna Karan’s wildly successful DKNY, among other companies. Arnell
had a booming presence and an unconventional portfolio. He had grown up
in relative poverty and had worked at the fringes of boutique advertising
before joining the ranks of Madison Avenue.
Despite weighing three hundred pounds, he dashed from meeting to
meeting with a Rolodex of high-powered contacts, from Martha Stewart to
Celine Dion, on speed dial. Sometimes he would show up for meetings at
his office, which was filled with model spaceships and Star Wars toys, in a
tennis outfit, barely stopping to catch his breath.
“I did all the ad work myself,” Arnell said. “I did the concepts and I shot
my own photos.”
For fashion shoots, he made his mark with a perennially favorite
subject: well-sculpted human bodies in black and white.
In our chats, Arnell came across as thoughtful and wise, if chatty. But I
heard from many former colleagues about Arnell’s sudden swings between
charm and explosive bouts of anger. In 2007 Gawker named him one of
“New York’s worst bosses.” Newsweek wrote that he made employees do
push-ups in front of clients.
“But, in his favor,” a reader wrote to Gawker, “when he’s not pretending
to kiss the ass of insipid rich, famous and powerful, he shows a refreshing
contempt for authority and takes an anarchistic delight in creative
destruction.”
Recalled Pete Skarzynski, former senior vice president for sales and
marketing at Samsung, “Not all of his ideas are good, but there’s a ton of
ideas.” He once charged Pepsi $1 million for a document that connected its
circular blue-and-red logo to the Mona Lisa, the Parthenon, and Hinduism.
“The universe expands exponentially with f(x)=e^x,” read the Arnell Group
report, attempting to link the speed of light to a cosmic transcendence that
included the Pepsi logo. “The Pepsi Orbits Dimensionalize Exponentially.”
“I think that electronics today are more and more like fashion,” Arnell