Samsung Trolls iPad 'Crush!' Ad, Says 'We Would Never Crush Creativity'

They won't crush creativity. They'll only copy it.

Given historical precedent this means Samsung will make the same kind of ad within 2 years of mocking Apple for it. ;)

Of course Samsung goes into Apple's trash to take whatever they can find.

First, one positive is that this ad shows a person.

Now on to a critique, which is way more time and energy than this ad deserves.

Samsung’s ad team makes a lot of questionable decisions. This is one of the worst ones they’ve made (I'm not saying it's a terrible ad, just that it's not an effective ad). Throwing together a reactionary ad to an advertisement from another company screams desperation. It allows another company to drive your narrative instead of promoting your own. That's marketing from a position of weakness. Samsung's reactions to the market leader (Apple) usually turn into copying Apple. Doing that in an ad (a reactive ad like this is a form of copying) isn't sending a great message.

Also, this ad is a weak argument for Samsung’s tablet. The tablet isn’t being used -- maybe that's what Samsung's ad team wanted to demonstrate -- but it makes the tablet completely unnecessary. The woman playing the guitar doesn't look at the tablet and doesn't play the scales (not music) shown on the tablet. So maybe Samsung isn’t “crushing” creativity (which was not the point of Apple's ad) but the ad is telling you that you don’t need to use or buy Samsung's tablets. Great marketing message! :rolleyes: Not all marketing is about selling a product or service, but this ad doesn't really do anything other than react to an ad. It's an extra low effort reaction video to the creativity and work other people did, which makes the whole ad where "Creativity cannot be crushed" ironic. It's a non-creative response to a creative ad.

The ad mainly calls attention to the elephant in the room (Apple) that makes tablets people use to get things done. Samsung's flagship Galaxy tablets are great from a hardware perspective, but the OS and apps are quite a bit behind Apple's iPadOS and app ecosystem. I used various Android-based tablets for years but switched to iPads to actually do anything useful. Most Android-based tablets are okay for consuming media, but are missing good versions (or any versions) of really useful apps that help people get things done. There are some good art apps on Android but they are on iPadOS too and with more, better options too. There are some niche apps and some games on Android that don't really exist for iPads, but they are more about consumption than production.

One last note. Samsung apparently sells a lot of tablets (I'm not sure how many are the flagship models that are decent iPad alternatives instead of the low end A series tablets), but Samsung's competition isn't Apple, it's Huawei and other companies. Samsung really needs to be focused on its real competition instead of reacting to Apple.

Apple, by the way, does way more to promote and support "creatives" than Samsung ever dreams about doing.

Disclaimer: I like Apple’s Crush ad so take my comment with that in mind. Sure, it could have been done differently, maybe alternative approaches would have been better, but it was effective (and I don't mean at creating controversy -- that was created by people who were looking for reasons to be offended).

Honestly "the outraged masses" will find something to complain about in anything. It was perfectly clear that the ad was saying all that creativity was being squeezed into something incredibly thin, if "the creative community" were complaining they don't sound that smart or creative to me.

They also said they’d not remove the headphone jack, SD card expansion and removable batteries.

Oh well.