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Samsung Rewrites the Smartphone Rivalry With The Next Big Thing
Samsung's 'The Next Big Thing Is Already Here' is a 2011 United States film campaign created by 72andSunny Los Angeles for Samsung Mobile USA, promoting the Galaxy S II smartphone by parodying the lines of Apple customers waiting for the iPhone 4S while Samsung owners walk past with a larger-screen, 4G-capable device already in hand.
The campaign launched on the Samsung Mobile USA Facebook page on November 23, 2011, according to campaign records documented at adsoftheworld.com and brandvelle.com. Television placement followed the very next day, during Thanksgiving NFL broadcasts on Fox and CBS, placing the ad in front of one of the largest live audiences of the American calendar year. The timing was deliberate and precisely calculated: the iPhone 4S had launched in October 2011, and the cultural moment of fans queuing overnight for Apple hardware was still vivid in the public imagination across the United States.
Todd Pendleton, Chief Marketing Officer of Samsung Mobile USA, articulated the dual ambition of the campaign at launch. 'The next big thing is already here,' Pendleton stated on November 23, 2011. 'You can have the latest, most innovative device without waiting in line.' He also framed the strategic intent behind the creative approach: 'We want to use the enthusiasm and word of mouth buzz to our advantage to educate consumers in a fun and new way.' Dale Sohn, President of Samsung Mobile, reinforced the commercial confidence behind the message, noting that 'the Galaxy S II has already shown its leadership and success through tremendous reviews and sales.' Together these statements reveal a brand that was not simply launching a product but asserting a new cultural position in the United States electronics market. The Clapboard Score for this campaign is 79 out of 100.
Samsung identified a specific and widely shared consumer frustration in the United States. The ritual of queuing for Apple hardware had become a cultural event unto itself, covered extensively by media and perceived by many consumers as performative loyalty rather than rational purchasing behaviour. By centering its 2011 campaign on that queue, Samsung positioned the Galaxy S II not merely as a competitor to the iPhone 4S but as the rational, already-available alternative for consumers who valued technology over brand theatre.
The strategic logic was reinforced by genuine product differentiation. The Galaxy S II offered a larger display and 4G connectivity at a moment when the iPhone 4S did not support 4G networks in the United States, a factual gap that gave the campaign's parody real argumentative weight. According to engadget.com, Samsung had achieved the position of the world's largest mobile phone manufacturer by volume in 2011, a structural shift that gave the brand commercial authority to make such a direct competitive claim. Global smartphone sales reached approximately 472 million units in 2011, growing 58 percent year over year, according to Images Samsung, reflecting the extraordinary velocity of the category in which this campaign operated.
Apple represented the dominant cultural force in United States smartphones at the time, while competitors such as HTC and BlackBerry were also active in the Android and enterprise segments respectively. Samsung's decision to target Apple specifically, rather than the broader category, was a strategic concentration of fire that 72andSunny translated into the campaign's ad parody creative device. According to businessinsider.com, this positioning marked a decisive shift in how Samsung approached marketing in the United States, moving from functional challenger messaging toward humour-driven, culturally aggressive brand communication.
72andSunny Los Angeles built the creative execution around a single, immediately legible observation. The central scene places Samsung Galaxy S II users walking past an Apple store queue, casually using the phone that the queuing customers are waiting weeks to purchase. The reversal is clean and requires no explanation: the people who did not wait in line already have the better device. That structural simplicity is the campaign's primary creative achievement, communicating product superiority through social comedy rather than technical specification.
The film format allowed the campaign to operate simultaneously as a television commercial and as social content, a duality that was still relatively novel in November 2011. Its premiere on the Samsung Mobile USA Facebook page before its Thanksgiving television broadcast, as documented by adsoftheworld.com and brandvelle.com, reflected an understanding that shareability and broadcast reach could reinforce each other rather than compete. The Thanksgiving NFL slot on Fox and CBS placed the film inside one of the most culturally unified viewing moments in the United States, lending the parody a mass-market legitimacy that purely digital distribution could not have provided alone.
The ad parody genre carries inherent risk: it must be specific enough to be recognisable but restrained enough to remain charming rather than mean. According to Adweek, as cited by En Wikipedia, the 2011 campaign was described as a defining moment in Samsung's competitive identity in the United States, suggesting that 72andSunny calibrated that tone with enough precision to earn broad approval rather than backlash. Production credits for the specific director and cinematographer on 'The Next Big Thing Is Already Here' are not publicly documented in available records. The campaign contains one media asset, a single film execution that carried the full weight of the repositioning strategy.
No verified performance data for 'The Next Big Thing Is Already Here' in the form of independently audited viewership figures, sales lift attributable to the campaign, or recall scores is publicly available. No verified award records for this campaign appear in the databases of Cannes Lions, the Effies, One Show, D&AD, the Clios, the Webby Awards, or WARC Awards, according to publicly accessible records from those organisations.
Structural analysis of the campaign's effectiveness nonetheless points to several durable indicators of impact. Samsung sold more than 10 million Galaxy S II units worldwide during 2011, according to images.samsung.com, a commercial result that the November launch campaign was designed to accelerate in the critical United States holiday retail window. According to brandvelle.com and businessinsider.com, the 2011 campaign is recognised as the origin point of Samsung's sustained comparative advertising strategy against Apple in the United States, a strategy that ran across subsequent years and became one of the most consistently recognised advertising postures in the American electronics category.
The decision to premiere on social media before broadcasting on television also established a production and distribution template that Samsung Mobile USA repeated in subsequent campaigns. According to en.wikipedia.org and scribd.com, the Galaxy S II campaign is cited in analyses of Samsung's United States marketing evolution as the moment the brand stopped deferring to Apple's cultural authority and began actively contesting it. That strategic consequence — the launch of an ongoing competitive narrative — represents a form of campaign effectiveness that metrics alone rarely capture fully.
Samsung's 'The Next Big Thing Is Already Here' is a November 2011 United States film campaign created by 72andSunny Los Angeles for the Galaxy S II. It parodies Apple store queues to argue that Samsung customers already own a superior device, establishing a competitive advertising posture that defined the brand for years. According to adsoftheworld.com, it premiered on November 23, 2011.
72andSunny Los Angeles created The Next Big Thing campaign for Samsung Mobile USA. The agency developed the ad parody concept that placed Galaxy S II users beside queuing iPhone 4S customers. Todd Pendleton served as Chief Marketing Officer of Samsung Mobile USA at the time and is publicly quoted endorsing the campaign's strategic direction, according to campaign records.
Samsung premiered The Next Big Thing on the Samsung Mobile USA Facebook page on November 23, 2011, according to brandvelle.com and adsoftheworld.com. Television broadcast followed on Thanksgiving Day, November 24, 2011, during NFL games on Fox and CBS, placing the film in front of a large, unified United States audience during the critical holiday retail period.
The campaign directly targeted Apple's iPhone 4S by parodying its famous launch queues. Samsung's Galaxy S II offered a larger screen and 4G capability that the iPhone 4S lacked in the United States at the time, giving the parody factual grounding. According to businessinsider.com, this marked Samsung's shift from functional challenger to culturally aggressive competitor in the US electronics market.
No verified award records for The Next Big Thing campaign appear in the publicly accessible databases of Cannes Lions, the Effies, One Show, D&AD, the Clios, the Webby Awards, or WARC Awards. Despite the absence of formal recognition, according to en.wikipedia.org and Adweek, the 2011 campaign is widely cited as a turning point in Samsung's United States brand and advertising strategy.
The Next Big Thing promoted the Samsung Galaxy S II smartphone in the United States. According to images.samsung.com, the Galaxy S II sold more than 10 million units worldwide in 2011. The campaign highlighted the device's larger display and 4G connectivity as direct advantages over the iPhone 4S, which did not support 4G networks in the United States at the time of launch.
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