Samsung pulls YouTube ad depicting computer ‘puppies’ being smashed
How do you get people to buy a staid computer storage device? If you’re Samsung, you try something that’ll definitely draw attention such as putting puppy faces on computers and then destroying them.
The South Korean tech giant has taken down a commercial it uploaded Monday to YouTube that featured computers that look like puppies, complete with ears and paws, getting smashed or thrown by their owners.
The video, titled “ Don’t Give Up on Puppy Love!,” showed people getting tired of their computers’ problems and then taking it out on the puppy computers.
One person was shown bashing his computer with its own keyboard; another one threw it off a cliff. Those scenes were followed by a man shooting his computer puppy with a bow and arrow and a woman smashing her laptop with her shoe.
Fortunately, the cruelty comes to an end when one man, who was on the brink of leaving his computer to be crushed at a landfill, changes his mind. Instead, he upgraded his computer by giving it a new Samsung SSD 840, a solid state storage drive. The video showed the computer starting to run better, and the puppy computer and man are best friends again.
Basically, what Samsung was trying to get across is that your old computer is like a cute puppy, and just as it is appalling and cruel to kill a puppy, it is also cruel to do that to your computer. Instead, Samsung suggests that you get your computer an upgraded drive and spare it from a cruel, puppy-like death.
The idea was nice, but Samsung’s delivery seems to have put off a lot of people.
On YouTube, almost all of the comments were negative toward Samsung, and it appears that the company decided to remove the ad after the video started getting more “dislikes” than it did “likes.”
“Samsung, this was wrong, really, show it to a kid and see the reaction,” one YouTube user said. “Come on, how could you? did you see the face of the yellow puppy as it was bashed? oh COME ON.”
The ad comes a week after another creepy video that Samsung put up to also market the SSD 840.
That video features an online personality known as Overly Attached Girlfriend who pretends to be your computer and then threatens to do things like share your search history or unleash viruses on itself unless you get it the SSD 840.
No doubt Samsung’s ads for the SSD 840 are disturbing, but then again, they’re also hard to forget.
“Never throwing a piece of technology out again as I will keep seeing dog faces on them,” another YouTube user said.
We’ve reached out to Samsung for comment.
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