Last year, Apple's marketing chief, Phil Schiller, ripped his ad agency, TBWA/Media Arts Lab, in a brutal email. We now have that email, thanks to the Samsung-Apple lawsuit.

For years, Apple and its ad agency have been regarded as masters of marketing, smoothly turning out campaigns that are often cited in business-school textbooks as examples of branding excellence. But the following emails show that journey was sometimes rocky.



In 2013, Schiller was unhappy that The Wall Street Journal wrote a story with the headline "Has Apple Lost Its Cool To Samsung?"

He forwarded the story to Apple's ad agency with one sentence that read, "We have a lot of work to do to turn this around":

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Apple's ad agency wrote back with a giant memo that laid out its plan to fix everything. It went a bit overboard, though. It compared Apple in 2013 to Apple in 1997. In 1997, Apple was on the edge of collapse. In 2013, not so much:

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Schiller was not happy with that response:

The ad agency tried to apologize to Schiller:





Later emails show the tension continued between the two groups. Schiller said Samsung's advertising was on fire, while Apple's was weak:





The ad agency tried to smooth things over, but you can see Apple's board was talking about Apple's advertising and how it was not good enough: