If you read any newspapers or watched any TV this
week, there is a good chance you know that Ellen DeGeneres took a “selfie”
photo with many stars (and one non-star) at the Academy Awards ceremony. Probably
you also know that it hit a record number of views on Twitter, and that she
used a Samsung phone. In fact, the picture was taken by a Samsung Galaxy Note
3, a so-called phablet because it is a phone so big that it is just a little
smaller than a Tablet. As an article in Wall Street Journal pointed out, this
was a product placement. Samsung had bought advertising time in the broadcast
and a placement event (not hers, actually), and when she planned taking selfies
the broadcaster ABC suggested she use the Samsung.
We are getting used to product placements now as a
way of more or less subtly influencing us. If you watch music videos, you have
probably noticed the odd-looking pill-shaped music player that often appears in
them. The advertising industry is currently wondering how much product
placement can be done before it really starts annoying people, but for now it
is seen as a useful collaboration.
The Samsung placement is especially interesting because
there are more interesting kinds of collaboration inside that phone, and involving
Samsung in general. First, we need to recognize that this is overall a Samsung
innovation: it leads the phablet market because they were the first to market
such a large phone, and other phone makers thought the size was so unpractical
that it took nearly a year of market success to convince them that this was a
viable market. But capable as Samsung may be, it cannot make a phone like that
using Samsung parts. Samsung makes the screen, which has a 1920 x 1080 density,
the same as the setting of the display that I am using now. (And, more than the
screen of my laptop can show. . . ) But inside the phone, the makers of parts
is a long list including Qualcomm, Wacom, Murata, Maxim, Broadcom, Avago,
Silicon Image, Micron, and Audience.
Phone makers typically put together devices from
many parts suppliers, so this is not completely unusual: an iPhone would also
have many parts makers, especially because Apple knows less about hardware
manufacturing than Samsung does. But the key point is that the parts of a
pioneering phone cannot just be ordered off the shelf, they involve
collaboration between the phone maker and the part makers. It is through a
large set of alliances and informal collaborations and much practice in making
them work well that Samsung is able to put together innovative phablets. For
me, part of the fun behind the Oscar Selfies news is that it involved Samsung,
a company we are using as an example of skills in using alliances in the book Network Advantage. Having Ellen DeGeneres do nice Selfies is the rest of the
fun: To me, the combination of Ellen and fun photography is hard to beat.
