Google takes a leaf out of Samsung’s marketing playbook in its latest Android ad, with a subtle swipe at Apple and the lack of choice you get when you choose iOS.
“Monotune” is part of the company’s “Be together. Not the same.” campaign, and it’s nothing short of brilliant.
Apple was notably absent from the Super Bowl ad slots Sunday, but a new video touting the Mac’s transformative power is quickly making Cupertino the most talked-about company the morning after the big game. The impressive clip continues the Mac’s 30th-anniversary celebration, and it was shot entirely on iPhones in 15 locations across five continents.
With Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, New Year and Chinese New Year all now firmly in our rear-view mirrors, Apple is focusing on the next big sales holiday of the year: Valentine’s Day.
Describing the iPad Air and iPad mini as “two ways to your valentine’s heart”, Apple has posted a new ad campaign on the main page of its online store — advising that users take advantage of Apple’s free custom engraving to “include a few love letters on any iPad”.
You’ve most probably seen Apple’s tear-jerking “Misunderstood” Christmas commercial: an ad about a seemingly isolated teenager who spends the holidays with their face buried in their iPhone — only to reveal at the end that they’ve been using the device’s camera to create a touching tribute to family togetherness.
Well, it seems that someone from Universal Studios Orlando’s ad agency David&Goliath also watched it (or else this whole thing is an amazing coincidence) because the theme park’s new ad — embedded above — bears an uncanny resemblance to Apple’s much-lauded commercial.
When your smartphone’s biggest selling point is its customization options, you need to get a little creative with your print ads. And that’s exactly what Motorola has done for the Moto X. In the January edition of Wired magazine, the company has a full-page ad with built-in LED lights that allows you to change the color of the Moto X printed on the page.
Check out the demonstration video below.
AT&T’s new early upgrade program is “calculating, sneaky, underhanded,” according to a new print ad from T-Mobile that will be published in USA Today.
AT&T Next is designed to let customers upgrade their smartphone more often — once every 12 months — and it is a direct competitor to T-Mobile’s new Jump plan. But T-Mobile has been quick to make its feelings about Next clear, accusing AT&T of trying to take more money from its customers.
I don’t know about you, but I spend a lot of time deleting spam messages from my inbox — despite using a junk mail filter. But the issue is about to get a whole lot worse, with Google gearing up to deliver adverts to our Gmail inboxes. The messages will appear under the new Promotions tab that was recently introduced in a Gmail update, and Google is testing them on a small number of users now.
Samsung has produced a new Galaxy S4 commercial for Iceland, and it’s possibly one of its weirdest smartphone adverts yet. It features some really strange dancing from a bunch of unconvincing ninjas, and a less than subtle dig at Apple using real apples.
Nokia has a new ad out for its latest Lumia 925 smartphone, and it attempts to praise the handset’s camera abilities by depicting iPhone owners as brain-dead zombies who have to use flash to take photos in the dark. Yeah, it makes no sense to me, either. Check it out below.
Apple has posted two new iPad ads to its official YouTube channel that highlight the device’s expansive app catalog. Called “Alive” and “Together,” the videos use the iPad and the iPad mini to showcase some of the 300,000 apps available through the App Store, including iBooks, GarageBand, iPhoto, FaceTime, TED, and more.
Amazon prides itself on offering affordable Android tablets, and so it likes to point that out whenever it gets the opportunity to do so. Usually this means taking a swipe at more expensive devices, and it’s Apple’s iPad that’s on the receiving end again in the company’s new commercial.
Focusing on the high-resolution displays in both devices, Amazon suggests that “you may not be able to tell the difference” between them… until you look at the price tags.
No, that headline isn’t wrong — Samsung has actually made a Galaxy commercial for the Super Bowl that doesn’t such. It features Knocked Up stars Seth Rogen and Paul Rudd, who play two writers pitching ideas for Samsung’s next commercial to Breaking Bad’s Bob Odenkirk.
It doesn’t mock other companies or rival devices, and it’s actually pretty hilarious. Check it out below.
Apple has made the iPhone more enterprise-friendly with almost every release of iOS, but some might say the company’s popular smartphone still isn’t ideal for business. When I say “some,” I mean Samsung. The Korean company just released a strange new advert to promote the enterprise features of its Galaxy S III and Galaxy Note II, and it couldn’t help but bash the iPhone and even BlackBerry devices at the same time.
Apple could be looking to switch its graphics cards supplier from NVIDIA back to AMD for the iMac. The Cupertino company began using NVIDIA solutions for its latest all-in-one, which started shipping late last month, but a job listing on its website suggests it could already be preparing to switch back. Apple is looking for a Hardware Systems Electrical Engineer with experience in AMD graphics processing units (GPU).
Steve Jobs said that touchscreen desktops just don’t work, pretty much ruling out the possibility of a touchscreen iMac in the future. But he also said that tablets under ten inches don’t work, and his company is now selling the awesome iPad mini. There’s every chance, then, that we’ll see an ‘iMac touch’ someday, and it’ll fit in perfectly alongside Apple’s iOS devices — as this awesome concept commercial demonstrates.
Apple’s iPad mini goes on sale today, and a lot of you who are reading this are likely going to pick one up, or will be waiting in for yours to be delivered. One person who probably won’t be buying the device, however, is chat show host Jimmy Kimmel, who calls it “a bigger but not gigantic iPod you cannot talk on.”
Samsung has begun shooting its next commercial, and like previous ads, this one will poke fun at Apple and its users — namely those who will be purchasing the new iPhone 5 this week. Unfazed by its recent court loss, the Korean company has erected a fake Apple store, complete with Macs and iOS devices, just so that it can mock every consumer using a rival device in a 30-second video.
Photos of the set, which is currently being constructed in Los Angeles, have begun making their way around the web, and they show the store in all its glory, with fake banners, and even fake Geniuses.
When Apple releases iOS 6 this week, the built-in YouTube app on your iOS devices will disappear the moment you update your devices. But you won’t miss it, because right on cue, Google has launched its official YouTube app for iPhone, and it’s available to download now.
When Apple began roping in celebrities to promote Siri in its latest iPhone 4S adds, Samuel L. Jackson was one of the first to star alongside the voice-controlled assistant. In the 30-second clip, entitled “Date Night,” he asks Siri to cancel golf, find organic mushrooms, convert volume units, and set a reminder.
Siri does as Jackson asks so quickly that he hardly has chance to finish his sentence. But how would she cope with his requests away from the cameras? The answer is: not very well at all.
Apple’s infamous 1984 advertising campaign for the original Macintosh needs little introduction from myself. The one-minute clip, which was inspired by George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four novel and depicts IBM users as mindless followers, was a huge success. So much so that the marketing guru behind it, Regis McKenna, believes it was more successful than the Macintosh itself.
Whether Samsung’s blatant Apple bashing adverts are actually convincing customers to buy its products is unclear, but they are at least inspiring other companies to mock Apple’s gadgets in their own ads.
Amazion is the latest, with a new Kindle ad that takes aim at the iPad for its poor reading conditions in direct sunlight, and its heavy price tag.
Did you choose to purchase an iPhone over the Android-powered Galaxy S II? Well, congratulations. Like many of us here at Cult of Mac, you’ve been “Samsunged!”
Despite Apple’s best attempts to get the tablet banished from Australian soil, Samsung is now selling its Android-powered Galaxy Tab 10.1 down under, and it has a whole new marketing angle that’s guaranteed to attract attention. The Korean company is now labeling its device “the tablet Apple tried to stop.”
Best Buy has launched a new ad that hopes to lure Apple fans into its stores this Christmas. In addition to Macs, iPads, iPhones, and iPods, the humorous “Everything Apple at Best Buy” ad also includes an appearance from old St. Nick himself.
While Samsung itself is quick to take Apple’s innovation and pass it off as its own, resulting in a number of lawsuits, the Korean electronics giant is still happy to mock the device that inspires many of its Android-powered smartphones. In a new TV commercial for its popular Galaxy S II handset, Samsung pokes fun at the iPhone and its devoted fans who wait in line for hours to pick up the device on launch day.
I think someone’s a little jealous that they don’t see endless queues when they churn out a new product.
To be fair to Samsung, it is rather humorous. My favorite bit: “You know, if it looks the same, how will people know I upgraded?”
[via The Mac Observer]
