14 DAY TRIAL // People's tastes range from the mundane to the outright bizarre, and Samsung is suffering the consequences of having succumbed to a bout of the latter type of urges.
Advertisements need to be unusual enough to engage viewers, but still familiar enough to prevent situations where onlookers have no idea what they are seeing.
For consumer electronics, it is easy enough to put one together and make it work. As long as the device shows up a few times, it doesn't matter all that much what the rest of the frames show.
Things can still take a turn for the weird though. And while this is not necessarily our opinion, enough people felt that Samsung had crossed a line with its latest laptop commercial.
“I’m actually a bit emotionally disturbed after viewing the early scenes of the ad,” wrote a person on Twitter.
“I’m an animal lover and have a number of pets at home and this brings up a very strong emotional reaction from me,” another said.
And here is where people will ask what the fuss is about. Normally, we would add a link to the video, or embed it at the end of the article, but that is no longer an option.
While the video was available here at one point, that is no longer the case, so we will all just have to make do with a summary.
The ad called “Don’t Give Up on Puppy Love!” promoted Samsung's solid-state drives and depicted owners getting fed up with their laptops.
This is a common enough occurrence, and we know of sufficient cases where anger escalated into violence and, sadly, the damaging or outright destruction of the devices in question.
Samsung's special “spin” on things was superimposing a big-eyed face clearly evoking cartoon puppies onto the PCs. Naturally, people began to note that the ad essentially depicted animal abuse, some even going as far as saying it condoned it.
We will have to wait and see what other strange things are turned into videos in the future.