Samsung has a long history of trolling Apple through ads. The Cupertino company would release a new product and roll out an elaborate marketing campaign, as one does, only for Samsung to fire up hilarious ads that have a bit of fun at Apple's expense. While Apple will never officially say that it doesn't like those ads, there's no denying that Samsung got under its skin.
Samsung's attorneys claimed during a trial against the company that those ads, particularly from the company's Next Big Thing campaign, “drove Apple crazy.” It had made Apple marketing head Phil Schiller come to the realization that the threat from Samsung could no longer be ignored. He apparently also recommended to Apple CEO Tim Cook that the company change marketing agencies and his proposals on crafting an appropriate response were reportedly discussed at board meetings as well.
The marketing department at Samsung has come up with many different ideas to take a jab at Apple. From directly calling out Apple for its lack of foldable phones to mocking its lower resolution cameras and even taking a swipe at Apple Pay, there are countless examples that go back nearly a decade.
Samsung has changed its approach in recent years and it's no longer too direct against Apple. On the contrary, the company even deleted many of its ads that made fun of Apple a few years ago, largely because it made some of the decisions that it had given Apple a hard time for itself, such as launching devices with a notch and ditching the headphone jack.
As an unapologetic Samsung fan, I quite liked it when the company would take a jab at its biggest rival. There aren't many companies that go so boldly against Apple while also making objectively good projects that can hold their own against the iPhone. It's also great to see what those brilliant creative minds can come up with.
Apple recently released an ad to promote the new OLED iPad Pro. Its marketing department may have thought the ad was depicting how the iPad Pro consolidates the best of art, music, education, and entertainment, but the ad ended up making a lot of people ad. Somehow the depiction of a giant hydraulic press crushing the entire history of humanity's creative achievements didn't go down well with people.
The backlash was as instant as it was intense, so much so that Apple had to apologize for the ad, with one executive having to agree that it had “missed the mark.” Clearly, Apple has come a long way from its famous 1984 ad showing how the new Macintosh would save humanity from Big Brother, the idea that represents conformity.
Samsung saw this as an opportunity to promote the Galaxy Tab S9 Ultra. It quickly spun up a response to the ad in a couple of days that presents a slightly different message. It shows that unlike the iPad Pro, the Galaxy Tab S9 Ultra isn't here to wipe out the history of human creativity, rather, it's here to complement it. Samsung's ad envisions a future where the past is given its due and not discarded in some dystopian reality.
We would never crush creativity. #UnCrush pic.twitter.com/qvlUqbRlnE
— Samsung Mobile US (@SamsungMobileUS) May 15, 2024
It was great to see Samsung's marketing department show some teeth again. We've been missing these riffs against Apple for some time now. It was admittedly Apple that dropped the ball here, giving Samsung a chance to poke fun at it, but this has always been something that Samsung has been great at. There are countless examples of the company getting under Apple's skin with its ads and that's one tradition I'd like to see continue.
Apple casts a very long shadow in the mobile industry. One could even argue that the walled garden approach for its ecosystem requires conformity from users, so someone has to run down the aisle and lob a hammer at Big Brother once in a while.
