Samsung's Advertising For The Galaxy S4 Has Been Weirdly — Deliberately?

samsung unicorn apocalypse

When Samsung unveils its new Galaxy S4 phone on March 14 it will be one of the biggest product launches of the year — in any category, not just tech.

So why has the company preceded this huge launch with some of the lamest advertising seen since the early 1980s?

Here's how strangely lame Samsung's current campaigns, for various products, actually are:

One ad shows a preteen boy, "Jeremy Maxwell," given a secret assignment by the company to deliver the new phone, which is unseen inside a glowing box. The acting is terrible. The concept is cheesy. (Video below.)
Yesterday, Samsung hired a flash mob to dance in Times Square. That concept is years out of date. The dancers were dressed in bowler hats and spats — appealing to the showtunes demographic, perhaps?
A separate campaign for the Galaxy brand involves a fake/real video game titled "Unicorn Apocalypse." It's funny because it's a bad idea, which is a good thing. But the concept is executed with such an extreme amount of hipster irony — the game is a side-scroller, of course, like the Defender arcade game — that it's surprising the unicorn doesn't have a big bushy beard. (Oh right, just such a beard appears on one of the game's "developers" in a previous Samsung teaser ad.)

I'm not the only one who thinks Samsung is phoning it in. The Verge said of the campaign:

"As teasers go, this is frustratingly bad — even by Samsung standards."

Mashable called it "strange."

The YouTube comments boards are filled with quotes such as:

manrock111: who is marketing director of this stupid campaign [?]

Samsung's main ad agency is 72andSunny, one of the hottest shops in the U.S. right now. That company was responsible for the Galaxy S3 launch ads, which poked fun at Apple fanboys waiting in line for their less-advanced phones. It also did that hilarious Samsung Super Bowl ad this year, starring Paul Rudd and Seth Rogen:

And Samsung has a $400 million ad budget— so it can afford to get the brightest talent available.

So Samsung has no excuses. ... unless, of course, that's all part of the plan.

Could it possibly be that Samsung is deliberately pulling its punches in favor of tomorrow's launch ads, which will be the most awesome new product advertising the world has ever seen?

It's the only explanation that makes sense.

Here's the teaser campaign: