David Eun Hired to Head Up Samsung Media Push

Former AOL Media and Studios President David Eun will head up Samsung's global media strategy.

Former AOL Media and Studios President David Eun will head up Samsung’s global media strategy and drive new business opportunities as its newest executive vice president.

Samsung is locked in a global battle with Apple across all digital media platforms from smartphones to TV sets (a market Apple has begun preparing to enter) to personal computers (which Samsung is preparing to re-enter). By integrating an attractive lineup of media properties with its consumer electronics, Samsung hopes to take on Apple on the content side of the competition.

Samsung has already begun knitting together its electronics with content with its lineup of connected TVs offering an extensive menu of featured content partners. It has also overtaken Apple as the world’s top smartphone maker.

Eun, a Korean American, had been canned by AOL in late February after it hired Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington to head up its new media strategy. During his brief one-year tenure at Samsung Eun had overseen and expanded AOL’s content operations to 100 websites while starting up multimedia production.

Among numerous positive metrics, during Eun’s tenure AOL search revenues jumped 36% after slipping 24% the year before and AOL video views jumped 62% while the industry slumped as a whole. Perhaps to call attention to his success with AOL’s video offerings in January, just before he was fired Eun ditched his usual low-profile style to star in an all-hands internal video memo in which he popped and techno-rapped a cheerleading message to the beat of the Taio Cruz dance tune Dynamite.

Less than a year before firing him AOL had hired him away from Google where Eun was heading up content partnerships. He had been unhappy devoting most of his energies to making deals for YouTube — which had been acquired by Google — though he had opposed buying the video-sharing site for $1.65 bil. He feared the site was likely to be more trouble than it was worth due to the many copyright issues implicated in YouTube’s very raison d’etre.

Before joining Google KDavid Eun worked in Time Warner’s content licensing area. Prior to that he was a partner at a venture capital firm specializing in digital media and information technology. He began his media career at NBC where he led merchandising efforts involving TV shows and the internet. His first job was management consultant at Bain & Co. He graduated from Harvard University magna cum laude in government, then from Harvard Law School.

Eun’s departure is cause for both hope and fear at AOL. Many AOL staffers had griped that Eun had lacked the vision to transform the company’s content offerings into positions of industry leadership. On the other hand, they now fear that Huffington will eliminate numerous AOL sites and staff in order to impose her peculiar brand of upmarket tabloid journalism over her new domain.

Huffington comes with the $315-million acquition of The Huffington Post last month by AOL CEO Tim Armstrong who has since announced many organizational changes to clear the deck for her new content regime. Eun too had been recruited by Armstrong. Both had worked at Google prior to Armstrong’s departure to head up AOL in March of 2009. Eun has said he moved to AOL mainly out of loyalty to Armstrong.

In the internet’s early stages AOL had been the dominant content site as well as the most popular ISP. Its acquisition of Time-Warner in January of 2000 was its high-water mark. Since then it has lost most of its market cap after being spun off by Time-Warner in 2009. It is currently struggling to redefine itself as a slimmed-down content site capable of vying for online advertising dollars against other leading sites.