Samsung Ads

TL;DR

• Role: Head of Design
• Timeframe: Nov 2013 to Dec 2015
• Business problem: Samsung had global reach through millions of screens but no product or business system to turn that into an advertising platform.
• What I changed: Co-founded the Samsung Ads effort, led design and front-end engineering, shaped the platform experience, partnered with data science, and helped scale from a four-person team into a business unit.
• Proof: A startup inside a global enterprise that began with four people and generated $20M in profit within its first year.

The problem was not making ads for TVs

The real problem was creating a new business inside a large company. You design product surfaces, but also trust with executives, workflows with data science, standards with partners, and enough operating structure for a small team to survive inside a much larger organism.

Samsung had the hardware footprint and first-party smart TV data at a scale no independent network could match, and no ad business to monetize any of it. The question was not whether smart TV advertising could be a business. It was whether a new team could move fast enough inside Samsung to prove the category before the window closed. Small team, big ambition, high ambiguity. Sat close to product and engineering because that was the only way to move fast enough.

Operator platform · Business Dashboard

3 points

123

1One visualization grammar2Curated signal3Patterns, not just totals

01 · One visualization grammar

The KPI tiles read the same way on every view, so a media buyer learns the system once and never re-learns it.

What I did

• Co-founded what became Samsung Ads as one of four founding members. Charged with building the design and front-end side: the advertiser platform, the data visualization layer, the standards posture with IAB, and the team behind all three.
• Led design and front-end engineering for the early platform. Held a quality bar that matched advertiser trust expectations from day one rather than deferring polish to a later phase.
• Partnered with data science to identify the signals advertisers actually used to make decisions, then designed around those. Surfacing all of Samsung's TV behavior data would have buried advertisers in noise.
• Filed a patent for visualizing aggregated TV viewership data through pattern recognition. The hard part was turning millions of viewing signals into something an advertiser could read and act on, not a raw data dump.
• Contributed to IAB working groups on smart TV and large-display advertising standards rather than waiting for external rules to land. That gave Samsung Ads early influence over the category and produced tighter design constraints for the platform.
• Mentored product managers, supervised a satellite team, and briefly served as general manager during the scaling phase.
• Aligned product, platform, and design standards across US and Korea collaboration throughout the build.

What changed

• Samsung Ads moved from stealth effort to real business unit: an ad platform, early design-system foundations, smart-TV advertising standards, and product patterns connecting viewer experience with advertiser needs.
• The business cleared $20M in profit in its first year, scaling from a four-person founding team.
• Contributed to IAB standards for smart TV and large-display advertising, giving Samsung Ads early category influence.
• Design work made its way into the broader Samsung TV experience and stayed there.

This case covers the full range: zero-to-one product, enterprise navigation, cross-functional leadership, data complexity, a clear business outcome, and craft under pressure.

Reflection

Speed inside a large company is never just speed. It is negotiation, alliances, and enough proof to keep the antibodies away. I would engage standards bodies earlier and more deliberately. We contributed, but reactively. Helping set the agenda from the start would have translated into cleaner product constraints and a stronger competitive position from day one.