Six words that separated the inventor of OLED from everyone selling it
LG sells its screen technology to half the industry. We had 24 hours to write the positioning that took the origin story back.
Key Results
24 hours
Research, executive interviews and four finished positioning statements — brief to presentation in two business days.
4 routes
Four ways to make one argument: LG is where OLED comes from. Nature imagery in every one, as the brief demanded.
Winning line
"OLED started waves. Others followed downstream."
LG's pick. The campaign was built on it.
Role
Brand Copywriter & Positioning Strategist
LG OLED · South Korea
The Challenge
The inventor had become a supplier
LG designed OLED, the screen technology behind the industry's most breathtaking, high-resolution imagery. Then it licensed the panels to other brands for their flagship TVs and gadgets.
Those brands sold OLED as a feature of their own products. In LG's home market of South Korea, the company that invented the technology was drifting into the same bracket as the companies buying it.
The fix wasn't a product claim. It was positioning: say who came first, without sounding like a company defending its patents. A Singaporean marketing agency brought us in to write the messaging the campaign would stand on.
The Solution
Poetry, not a tagline
LG were explicit about what they didn't want: the generic lines every electronics campaign runs. They wanted something poetic, and they wanted it carried by nature.
Phase 1
Research and executive interviews
The brief had already beaten a series of marketers. We had 24 hours.
We ran the research and interviewed members of LG's executive team, because the line had to come out of how the company talks about inventing OLED — not how an agency imagines it.
Phase 2
Four routes to one claim
We wrote four positioning statements: the same argument in four registers, each carrying the water and nature imagery LG had asked for, each putting LG at the source and everyone else after it.
The winning line
"OLED started waves. Others followed downstream."
Six words. It claims the origin, uses the imagery LG asked for, and puts every competitor behind them without naming a single one.
Water and waves — the imagery LG asked the line to be carried by.
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