Do you often find yourself compulsively stuck in GIF-style sequences where you're repeating the same everyday action in a continuous loop just for fun? If so, Samsung would like you to consider its Galaxy S6.
The new ad below shows a bunch of happy young people doing a series of happy activities—flipping eggs, subway dancing, popping champaign. But instead of featuring each activity just once, the ad cuts them into a stuttering sequence of mini-clips that the brand is describing as GIFs, and which it's also planning to use individually to promote the phone.
Big Spaceship selected the video's music track, "When I Rule the World" by Liz, which will be released on Columbia Records in the coming weeks. It's a gleefully shrill, domineering record, apparently meant to appeal to youthful hubris, though if the rest of you olds can clear the blood out of your ears long enough to hear the lyrics, the sexual undertones are actually kind of subversive for a major marketer. It's not every day you hear Samsung telling you to "get down on your knees and then do as I please until I tell you to stop" (even if that hope might be the basic premise at the heart of all of its messaging).
As fun as it might be, beating viewers about the head with fun and optimism could read as symptomatic of not having very much to say. Instead, Samsung harps on an intrinsically generic "new phone feeling," which it suggests this phone will give you over and over again. And while the GIF approach theoretically fits the zeitgeist, the concept ends up feeling a little half-baked. How hypnotizing or rewarding is it really to watch a guy pour coffee on repeat?
GIFs at their best tend to turn on some kind of exceptional visual cleverness or silliness or weirdness that's riveting in its own right—not just a circular, slick, relatively mundane sales pitch. That, even if it is possible to tie simpler loops into a clearer narrative and proposition, as Spanish soccer magazine Libero proved with its dancing players.
At least nobody can accuse Samsung of not getting enough product shots in, though.