If you’re struggling with impostor syndrome, this Samsung ad might help you feel better
Who hasn’t been fact-checked by their ad platform?
Do you ever feel like everyone on your team is smarter than you? As the resident dumbest-guy-in-the-room, 90% of my job is asking stupid questions just in case someone (me) is missing an important point.
And sometimes, that leaves me feeling like I’m actually a turbo idiot who deserves nothing but being left destitute with only a dunce cap to my name.
But most times, like every time I’m exposed to the inner workings of massive global enterprises, I realize that I’m just among the dumbest people in the room.
This week, Samsung ran an ad on Twitter for its new Galaxy phone.
It looks like a normal corporate ad:
✅ Unnecessary hashtag only used in this ad campaign
✅ Hashtagging terms no normal person ever clicks
✅ Boring imagery
✅ Encouraging engagement in ways that say “I no longer understand how non-advertisers think”
But scroll down, and this ad has something special:
This ad has been running for over 2 weeks.
If you feel dumb, at least you never got fact-checked on your own ad.
It’s hard to know who’s to blame for this, Should we blame product for goosing the camera? (If you want to make my skin look unnnaturally smooth by default, fine. But enhancing the moon is there I draw the line.) Should we blame marketing for somehow forgetting the mini-scandal from like two weeks ago and keeping the ad on? Or maybe blame the ad agency for keeping this up weeks after they got clap-backed by the world’s worst social media network?
Of course, being white, I’ve read The Secret. So I choose abundant living and know there’s room to blame all of the above.
Thank you, Samsung Mobile marketing team, for reminding all of us the bar is lower than our CDs want us to believe.
As of publication, this tweet is still live: https://twitter.com/SamsungMobile/status/1646875453473583105
If they’re still running it, it must work because rich people and companies are smart. It’s proof that Rand Fishkin was wrong: performance analytics is cleary not a scam designed to spend money in order to make it look like advertising works and thus artificially perpetuate the advertising industry.
