My Favorite (and Least Favorite) Tech Ads of the Holiday Season
Apple’s “Misunderstood’ vs Samsung’s “Are You Geared Up”
Tech companies roll out a lot of advertisements during the holidays, hoping to cash in some of our joyful year-end spending. A couple of ads really caught my attention this year. One was fabulous while the other was either the worst tech ad of the year or a very clever parody of a tech ad trying to be bad to get us to talk about how incredibly bad it was.
The Best
My favorite Christmas ad was Apple’s “Misunderstood’ video. It tells the story of a teenage boy, home for the holidays who produces a beautiful, heartwarming video for his family using his iPhone (and although unseen, presumably iMovie, iPhoto and Mac). Like most teenage boys, he is not skilled at expressing himself in person and worries that his family will mistake his silence for a lack of care. To communicate his true feelings, he quickly dedicates himself to expressing his love through a heartwarming video.
The commercial is gorgeously filmed, set on a snowy Christmas day and accompanied by a piano playing “Have Yourself a Very Merry Christmas” and “I’ll be home for Christmas”.
What’s so powerful about the ad is that it doesn’t hit us over the head with a slew of “iFeatures” but rather tells us a simple story, showing us what can be produced with Apple’s products.
More importantly, the video shows us the value of what the boy could produce when his family watches and is brought to tears at the end. The gift wasn’t a shiny expensive new iPhone but rather the happiness he captured and memorialized for his family to share. Who wouldn’t want to bring such joy their family during the holidays?
The video is also cleverly a video within a video with the boy’s production shown at the end. The full version is available separately on Apple’s site helping them to build a larger holiday campaign around the concept.
The Worst
The most horendous video of the year was “Are You Geared Up”, produced by Samsung to promote the Galaxy Note 3, “and Gear”.
It depicts a really creepy guy named “Jag”, who stalks a pretty girl with his watch phone while another guy who is supposed to be the loser fails to get the girl using his clumsy old smart phone — really?
