Date : 08 Ekim  2013 Salı - 13:46, Category : SCI/TECH

I was sitting waiting for a takeout pizza and saw the spot. My mind jumped right to the ‘Hello’ spot because there was too many similarities to ignore. That assessment wasn’t based off of careful consideration or analysis. Just a general impression. But that’s often the way advertising works best, by giving a ‘general impression’ of something.

After thinking about it for a bit, it seems clear that the Samsung spot had to have been ‘inspired’ at some point by the ‘Hello’ spot. The marketing firm in charge of this spot was Cheil, which is Samsung’s in-house ad wing. They have no other clients. It seems highly likely that Cheil would have used the ‘Hello’ spot as a part of their pitch to the Samsung executives in charge of the Gear launch.

But, news flash, this is exactly how ad agencies work. They often use established works to create an impression for their clients, and then the ads are built off of those impressions. And since Cheil is the in-house agency for Samsung, it seems likely that they’re pretty limited creatively. They execute on their only client’s ideas, with an enormous budget, but they can’t exactly tell them they’re not the right agency for the job and move on when their sole client’s ideas are intellectually bankrupt.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with Samsung taking inspiration from the ‘Hello’ spot. However—and this is an important note — Samsung is a company which has had a billion-dollar judgement against it for copying Apple’s work.

If I was a company which had gained a reputation for copying Apple’s work, the last thing I’d want is to have my advertising associated with anything they’d ever done.

Examining the Samsung spot closer, there are a number of differences in execution between it and the ‘Hello’ spot. Yes, they’re both supercuts and yes, they both use old movies to make their point. But the Galaxy Gear spot shows objects from the future, not the past, and positions the Gear product as something bringing those future things to the now, not replacing the devices of the past.

In what is a moment of incredible irony, the clips that Samsung chose for its spot actually make the Gear look pretty terrible in comparison. The gadgets in those clips and movies did amazing, wonderful things like communicating across vast areas of space and analyzing the environment. Only a few of them were actually ‘phones’ — which is how Samsung pitches the Gear.