I tweeted about it, but was I the only one who was really weirded out by the Samsung ad? It was just so...bad.
I'm not criticizing Samsung's ad for not being
true, because (shocker!) ads often aren't. But good ads
ring true. The less bullshit the better, but if you have bullshit it at the very least can't smell like bullshit. And that whole series of ads with the line-waiters smells like bullshit.
Even ignoring cringe-worthy contrived lines like "we just got Samsunged," the whole premise just feels off. Samsung's trying to have it both ways; they're poking fun at line-waiters for being sheep while also suggesting that they want to be freed by whatever phone Samsung's pushing that week. But these messages are self-contradictory; nobody waits in line for a product they're eager to
escape. So the whole thing smells like bullshit.
It's true that I think Samsung's products are substandard, but that's not what I'm talking about here. It's just that the advertising sucks. Instead of having some dude go "Is that a PEN?" and then having everybody shout "Freedom!" and fleeing the Apple Store, maybe they could just, idunno, show us why a pen might be useful? I'm in the Steve Jobs if-you-see-a-stylus-they-blew-it camp, but not everybody is. And if they built a pen into their product, they obviously think that it's useful, right? They didn't just put it their to have a pointless differentiator from the glut of other identical handsets,
right?
Valentine's Day is approaching. They could show people exchanging sweet handwritten notes. Hell, it's still winter; they could show people using the pen to use their phone while wearing
gloves. Either of those could make for an effective ad! Instead, they chose bullshit.
It's just
weird how so many Android ads — Samsung's ads, last year's Xoom ads — go for the "it's not Apple!" angle instead of, y'know, selling the product. Even BlackBerry seems to be getting into the weirdly negative ad game, with their recent round of "We need tools, not toys!" ads. It reminds me of the iPod era, where so many MP3 player companies marketed to the too-hip-for-anything-popular, anything-but-iPod crowd because
that was all they could reach.
The difference is, the iPhone doesn't have iPod-style market share (yet). And it's weird seeing Android fans crowing about how Android is winning the market share battle and becoming the OS for the masses while simultaneously deriding Apple users as sheep who are just following the crowd.
Woo, tangent.