If I was Juno Cho, LG’s President of Mobile Products I would not be a happy man this evening.  In fact I would be pissed.  No.  I’d want a crossbow with a picture of Michael Bay’s face tacked to the target.

Michael Bay should be mortified but, in spite of his considerable directorial talent, I’m not so sure he’s that bright.  Or perhaps, like some others with creative genius, he has a bright headlight with a narrow focus.  If he was anyone else, this would be a cautionary tale.

Here’s what went down:

Today at CTIA, LG was showing off their global promotion in conjunction with Dreamworks SKG and Michael Bay of their collaboration around the new Transformers Revenge Movie.  This included the world premier of the trailer for the movie just at the end of the day.  After the trailer which had delivered quite a crowd, Juno delivered a few words culminating with a very warm welcome for their surprise guest, Michael Bay, who just happened to be in town for an awards show in the next day or two.

Michael was warmly applauded.  Casually dressed, he seemed at ease as he took the mic, said hello, then said, “I have some big news: I’ve just been named the next CEO of LGE…”  The crowd laughed.

Michael smiled again and then delivered a nice turd for his partners by saying “No.  Seriously – I don’t know anything about mobile phones.  In fact, look at my phone (which he held up) – it’s a Thirty-Nine dollar Samsung”

You could feel Mr Cho’s anger from across the room.  LG people ran to get phones, Mr. Cho went up to Michael (who seemed oblivious to the enormous slap he’d just delivered to every LG employee’s face) and said, “Here now you have an LG phone” and gave him his own personal device.  He took the mic back and quickly wrapped up the disastrous press conference. But not before Micheal could dish out a little more pain…”but all my contacts are in the other one” he said in a petulant voice.

Juno said “we’ll take care of that.”  I couldn’t help but wonder what sort of care he was imagining taking and of whom.

Way to go Michael, that was classy as hell.  I don’t think you could have insulted them more thouroughly if you’d planned it for months.

Making matters even worse, I later heard that they’d even scripted all Michael’s remarks but for whatever reason, maybe because he’s retarded or perhaps he’s just a total jerk, he elected to trash LG instead.

Samsung must be delighted – they’ll still be talking about this next time I’m back in Korea, just you watch.