The first useful clue in Cathy Oh's career is a summer internship at Bravo. Cable television still came with channels, schedules and a dependable sense of where the audience would be. Oh found marketing there while she was in college. From that starting point, her résumé would keep moving toward screens whose rules were less settled: the web at WebMD, mobile advertising at Apple, then connected television at Samsung.
Look backward and the path has a clean shape. At the time, each move meant stepping into a medium that marketers were still learning to buy, measure and explain. Oh's particular skill has been translation. She learns the technology, finds the behavior hiding inside it and turns both into a case a brand can understand.
That work matters because a television is now several businesses disguised as a rectangle. It is an entertainment device, an operating system, a distribution platform and an advertising surface. A viewer can move between broadcast, subscription streaming and free ad-supported channels without caring which acronym funded the next half hour. The marketer has to care. Someone must connect the hardware, viewing signals, creative format and commercial result without flattening the person watching into a row of data.
Learning the product behind the pitch
After Bravo, Oh worked across NBCUniversal properties including iVillage and Syfy. The jobs sat near familiar television brands, but media consumption was already becoming more fragmented. In 2009 she moved to WebMD as director of integrated marketing. She later described that stop as the place where she fell in love with product marketing, with understanding software and tools.
It is a revealing distinction. Brand marketing can begin with a feeling. Product marketing has to survive contact with the thing itself. What does it do? Who needs it? Which problem becomes easier? Those questions became portable. Oh took them to Apple's iAd business, where she first led sales marketing and then global marketing for brands and agencies. She helped build Apple's first sales-marketing organization focused on advertising, working at the intersection of a coveted device, a new mobile behavior and an ad product the market had to learn.
In 2015, Samsung offered a larger canvas. Oh joined Samsung Ads as one of its original five leaders. The unit started with a single product offering and grew into an international organization with more than 500 employees by 2021. Oh helped establish its brand while working across marketing, sales, product development, analytics and expansion into new regions.
“One of the recommendations I always have, especially with brands and marketers that are new to CTV, is to do a test.”Cathy Oh, on lowering the barrier to a new medium
The television learns to answer back
Oh's explanation of connected TV begins with behavior. Samsung can look across connected televisions and devices in a household to understand viewing patterns. Those patterns help advertisers plan campaigns, avoid repeatedly reaching the same people and examine what happened after an ad appeared. The proposition joins television's large-screen storytelling with digital media's ability to learn.
She resists the easy prediction that streaming simply erases linear television. Her account is more practical: both remain in the mix, while buyers face the harder job of managing reach, frequency and measurement across them. In a 2023 interview about Australia, she encouraged brands new to CTV to run a test. The experiment can produce insights that pure broadcast cannot and may improve decisions elsewhere in the media plan.
This is the operator's version of evangelism. Begin with a bounded commitment. Show the buyer what the product can reveal. Earn a larger role through evidence. In a market thick with forecasts, Oh keeps returning to proof: trusted data, comparable metrics, campaign benchmarks and clearer links between spending and results.
A playbook worth borrowing
- Learn the machinery well enough to describe the customer behavior it enables.
- Give a skeptical buyer a small, measurable way to begin.
- Use the result to improve the whole system, not only the new channel.
Her 2025 outlook placed data clean rooms at the center of the next measurement phase. The name sounds clinical, but the business idea is straightforward: brands and platforms need a privacy-conscious way to compare their information and judge performance. Oh described the necessary partnership as a trio of brands, clean rooms and CTV platforms with deterministic data. No single vendor supplies the entire answer.
A system for voices, too
Oh applies a similar systems instinct to leadership. Her advice to young, diverse talent is direct: bring a different perspective, speak up, ask questions and arrive with a solution-oriented mind. But she does not place the entire burden on the person trying to be heard. Representation, in her account, needs support, awareness, advocacy, collaboration and mentorship around it.
She was a founding member and executive sponsor of Women+, a Samsung Ads employee resource group designed to support women through mentorship, allyship, recognition and the sharing of personal lessons. By 2021, the group included women and men across 13 cities and eight countries. The design matters. A voice is more likely to change a room when the room has practices that keep it from being dismissed.
Her community work extended outside Samsung. Oh served on the board of the Korean American Community Foundation, which supports Korean American and broader Asian American communities. When fundraising moved online during the pandemic, the foundation's president credited Oh's digital expertise with helping its virtual events succeed. She also served as an adviser to Conscious Step, a Brooklyn business that ties purchases to charitable causes.
“Don't be afraid to speak up, ask questions and think from a different angle.”Cathy Oh, advice for young talent
The through line is less sentimental than it first appears. Good marketing makes an unfamiliar product legible. Good leadership makes an overlooked contribution legible. Both depend on noticing signals, interpreting them and building a setting in which they can affect the next decision.
Participation becomes the proof
By 2024, Oh's remit covered marketing for Samsung's TV and mobile services alongside Samsung Ads. That meant the advertising platform sat near consumer services such as Samsung Gaming Hub, Samsung Art Store, Samsung News and Samsung TV Plus. The border between content, interface and ad format was getting thinner.
Recognition from Ad Age, She Runs It and Chief Marketer arrived as her remit expanded across Samsung services.
Samsung Ads presented interactive formats, creative services and data partnerships at NewFronts; Oh marked ten years at Samsung.
At CES, her focus moved toward participation, accurate attribution and full-funnel performance.
At the 2025 NewFronts, the team presented ways to turn familiar television assets into interactive ads, add playable moments to breaks and connect campaigns with clean-room partnerships. Oh's language for the following year sharpened the idea: “Participation is the purest form of attention.” When a viewer chooses, clicks, reacts or explores, an impression becomes an observable action.
That principle changes the creative brief as much as the measurement plan. Advertising designed for participation has to offer a reason to act. It also has to accept the viewer's refusal. Interruption demands a moment; invitation earns one. For an executive who has spent a career around changing screens, the shift brings the pieces together: product, story, data and a person making a choice.
After CES 2026, Oh wrote about the industry's consolidation, the creator economy, the difficulty of accurate attribution and the ubiquity of AI. Then she did something smaller and more revealing. She listed the teams behind Samsung Ads' presence: brand marketing, events, creative studios, growth marketing, public relations, operations and agency partners. The polished week in Las Vegas had taken months. She made the invisible work visible.
Oh's career has accumulated awards, including recognition from Multichannel News, Ad Age, She Runs It, AdExchanger, AdMonsters and Chief Marketer. The more useful achievement is the operating pattern underneath them. Enter a new medium early. Study the product. Explain the behavior. Let a customer test the claim. Build support around the people doing the work. Credit them when the lights come on.
The screen will change again. Some part of it will become a shop, a game, a conversation or a service that lacks a settled name. Cathy Oh's bet is that marketers will need more than reach. They will need evidence of willing participation. Her own story suggests how to get there: curiosity before certainty, a system behind the message and enough respect for the audience to invite an answer.