Snippet: Samsung’s New Ads Miss the Point ☇

Joe Rossignol for MacRumors:

Samsung has expanded upon its “Ingenius” ad campaign with three new videos titled Dongle, Fast Charger, and Camera.

In each of the videos, Samsung depicts an Apple Store employee having a conversation with a customer, attempting to justify the iPhone compared to the Galaxy S9, as it relates to the camera, dongles, and more.

In the first ad, a customer asks if he can use his wired headphones with the iPhone X, and the Genius informs him that he will need a dongle. The customer then inquires about charging at the same time, and the Genius says he’ll need another dongle. The customer then says, “so, a double dongle.”

The arguments in these ads aren’t wrong—the Galaxy S9 has some features that the iPhones don’t. I think they miss the mark because they don’t show you the Galaxy S9 or talk about why it’s better if you aren’t looking for one of those features. The Apple Genius parody is a bit played out and lazy. The Galaxy S9 may be an amazing piece of hardware, but the selling point isn’t if it has feature x, but rather getting someone who has a lot of investment (both monetarily, time, and familiarity) in Apple’s ecosystem.

Instead, and I want to reiterate that this comes from leaving any of my own pro-Apple bias out of the equation, Samsung should focus on advertising why their phone is better than every other Android manufacturer’s, and if you happen to be an iPhone user considering switching, why you should choose a Galaxy over a Pixel, ThinQ, or something else.