Guest
Cathy Oh
Founding Chief Marketing Officer, Samsung Ads
More than two decades across linear TV, mobile and connected TV advertising, Cathy Oh is a category builder who treats AI as a facilitator and keeps the human at the start of the creative.
About
Cathy Oh is the Founding Chief Marketing Officer of Samsung Ads, where by her account she spent 11 years defining the connected TV and streaming advertising category. She is known for reading each new advertising technology before it has a name, and for a thesis that AI is a facilitator rather than a finished product.
Oh began as a bioscience major at Carnegie Mellon, failing by year two, until a personality exam steered her toward business, marketing, PR and communications. She interned at CNBC at NBC Universal in ad sales marketing, then started her career at Bravo in the same division. At SyFy she watched digital banners given away free because no one could yet value them, an early sign of her instinct for categories before they are priced. She went on to Apple, where she says she helped define what mobile in-app advertising looked like, before joining Samsung in 2015.
At Samsung, Oh says the connected TV category did not yet exist, and was called Wi-Fi TV and connected apps. Over 11 years she helped define it, introducing new ways of measurement and building internally while, in her words, always looking around the corner at the problem to solve. Now Founding Chief Marketing Officer of Samsung Ads, Oh sits on the New York leadership hub of the nonprofit Women Applying AI, keeps her head in the founder space, and describes having 50 to 60 conversations a day with founders, VCs and PEs as her ongoing education.
Career22 years
- 2023 to 2026 Samsung Electronics Chief Marketing Officer | Samsung Ads & Service Business
- 2019 to 2023 Samsung Electronics Global Head of Marketing | Samsung Ads
- 2015 to 2018 Samsung Electronics Head of Marketing & Analytics, Founding Member | Samsung Ads
- 2014 to 2015 Apple Global Head of Marketing, iAd Brands & Agencies
Show earlier roles: Apple, WebMD, NBC Universal
- 2011 to 2014 Apple Head of Sales Marketing, iAd
- 2009 to 2011 WebMD Director, Integrated Marketing
- 2004 to 2009 NBC Universal Director, Strategic Marketing
How Cathy thinks3 convictions
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Creative stays human
Oh rejects the headline that creatives are the first to be cut. She believes AI will help the craft evolve and that the creatives who last are the ones who use the tools, but she insists the thinking has to start with a person. An AI ad, she says, still lacks a story, no matter how realistic it feels.
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We trust machines more
Oh is still working out where she stands on this idea, which she finds both disheartening and exciting. She sees the sadness in it for the human race, and the upside in contexts like therapy, where people might be more honest with a machine than with a face giving them a look. It is, she says, a tricky fine line to balance.
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Be a student again
For Oh, every new technology resets the game, which is why she treats herself as a perpetual student. She fills her days with founder, VC and PE conversations rather than reports, because she wants to see what is being built and who is taking off. It is a posture she urges on young professionals: lean in, get excited and do not be afraid to try.