Samsung Mobile USA aired a 90-second TV commercial during the Super Bowl yesterday. The air buy itself reportedly cost US$10.5 million. The cost of the ad itself, directed by one half of the Farrelly brothers, Bobby Farrelly, is unknown.
The ad, featuring the British glam rock band The Darkness, advertised Samsung’s Galaxy Note, a mobile device with a 5.3-inch display and a 1990s-era stylus that retails for $300 with a two-year AT&T Mobility contract.
MacDailyNews Take: Cute ad, Samsung, but your desperation is showing. Bill Gates is on line 2, he wants his stylus back.
Who wants a stylus? You have to get ‘em and put ‘em away, and you lose ‘em. Yuck. Nobody wants a stylus. So let’s not use a stylus. We’re going to use the best pointing device in the world. We’re going to use a pointing device that we’re all born with — born with ten of them. We’re going to use our fingers. We’re going to touch this with our fingers. – Steve Jobs, January 9, 2007
If you think a $300 oversized pretend iPhone with a fscking stylus is really going to cause one person to leave the iPhone 5 line, you must think that it’s fine and dandy to slavishly copy other companies’ products by stealing their patented IP, that it’s smart to permanently alienate a company’s millions of customers while advertising a device that would not even exist without said company, that it’s okay to commit rampant trade dress infringement with virtually every piece of plastic crap that you churn out, and that it’s perfectly acceptable to have to sew oversized pockets on all of your clothes in order to house a stupidly gigantic stylus-holder that does nothing but further fragment and bastardize a platform that’s already fragmented and bastardized beyond repair.
As the ad rolled live, a mobile developer in the room muttered, “More bullshit to ignore.”
As we wrote when this ad campaign first appeared, “What this ad screams to us is that Samsung is concerned with keeping the sheep they have in the pen. “Don’t wander!” That’s all this particular ad is about. Siri’s siren call has created some very restless sheep and that obviously has Samsung spooked.”
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Lets rejoice at the lack of serious competition
My cousin was born with 11 styluses.
Well, if you think about it this way, they are helping Apple because it’s exagerating the fact that Apple have lines and samdung don’t. How dumb are they??
THE PEOPLE WILL WANT A PEN BECAUSE IF THEY DON’T THEY ARE APPLE SHEEP.
Sorry for putting it in all caps, that’s sort of how the ad does it, too.
There is almost 30% of negative votes for that video on YouTube. Commercials very rarely get this many negative votes, especially if they aren’t really controversial or shocking (and this one is neither).
Apple fans seem to be out in force.
What’s next…a tiny mouse with a slide out mousepad?
Samsung and Microsloth, on a race to the bottom. Free entertainment for us.
Yes, please let me buy the product rep’d by the douche in a pinstripe jumpsuit with his chest hair showing. Please.
He may be in some ironic, retro, glam, blah blah blah. I lived through glam rock already. I don’t need some hipster douche to bring it back.
The ad was laughable to me because it portrayed a wild, untame life outside the line. Maybe I’m getting old, ha, but I don’t want an unpredictable/clumsy/stupid?? experience.
This ad ranked right up there with Madonna’s stupid half time show!
Hey…I liked Madonna’s stupid half time show. The dancing, acrobatics and choreography with the cool cinematic display was particularly well done. I am not a fan of Madonna buyt give credit where it is due. Best half time show I have seen in a while.
BTW, I was rooting for NY so it was a good all around day.
Samsung needs to stop trying to compete with Apple and instead team up with them by supplying OLED screens for the upcoming iTV. They will make far more money doing that than on any of their sundry “smart” phone ventures.
Samsung should ask for their money back from Bobby Farrelly. The tree in the background looks like it is growing out of the guitarist’s head.
If i had to use one these I`d definitely feel like I`ve been Samsunged.
They almost made a stylus look cool! Ack.
So who cares what ‘Samdung’ puts up for sale? Once you have the reputation for producing substandard products that are predominantly ‘knock offs’ then the mud has the tendency to stick.
Is that meant to be a John Gruber lookalike? Ha!
The point of the stylus for SangDung is to marketing to the dementia crowd in nursing homes. Those are the ones that remember Palm Pilot as the latest technology. They would see the SungDang tablet as an improvement. I like their strategy, I wonder who reached Beleaguered status first, M$ or SingSame?
🙂
The point of the stylus for SandDung is to market to the dementia crowd in nursing homes. Those are the ones that remember the Palm Pilot as the latest technology. They would see the SungDang tablet as an improvement. I like their strategy, I wonder who will each ‘Beleaguered’ status first, M$ or SingSame??? (Sorry for the typos in previous post.) 🙂
That ad… The dancing just reminds me of ms and their flash mob dances. Totally dorky and w/o purpose. And that “phone” it’s f’n HUGE! I sure s#| don’t want to try and put that in a shirt or pants pocket!
Superficially these commercials remind me of the “I’m a Mac” campaign.
Euhhhh, nobody commented on the “moronity” of the commercial…..it is like the MS commercial for a sing along piece of software that we in Europe thought was a fake but turned out to be real. If you had told me this was a publicity stunt by Apple I would have believed it! This a not a commercial that would win a customer here, that’s for sure!