Most people hate the sound of ads, but whether on the Internet, on billboards or on TV commercials, they are a highly effective way of getting information to the public. Smartphone manufacturers use all these means to sell their latest models, but their effectiveness varies widely. Google Pixel smartphones are approaching their fifth anniversary, and while sales are struggling, I don’t think Google’s advertising dollars are weighing much.
Earlier this month, I took my first vacation since the pandemic began, going to a cabin in the mountains for a few nights. While my wife and I were watching the cable TV from the cabin, I couldn’t help but notice the commercials that passed by. Over the course of an hour, I watched almost half a dozen reproductions of an ad for the Samsung Galaxy S21.
The brief comment was one of which I disagreed, since the focus was to call the phone “different” when, in reality, it is basically a cheaper version of the Galaxy S20. And really, the Galaxy S line as a whole has felt more and more similar every year for the past few generations, so that line doesn’t really make sense.
However, the ad sent a clear message to customers – how valuable the device can be to them. He focuses on the camera experience, mentioning 8K video support. While this feature alone is not worthwhile, Samsung tells its potential customers that they can extract static frames from this video without sacrificing quality. After that? Battery life, simply saying “you will have battery all day”. The conclusion that “this It is different ”is, again, one of which I disagree, but this is a highly effective advertisement to sell this device.
In addition to the winning formula, Samsung reproduces this announcement much. According to the analysis company Wave7 Research, Samsung spent $ 3.5 million on this announcement only between March 4 and 11 in the United States.
On the Google side of things, the image is not a good one. Google needs people to know their phones, and efforts to do so through ads like these are absolutely disheartening.
The same Wave7 report reveals that between January 31 and March 7, Google pushed an ad for the Pixel 4a 5G about 4,000 times. The dollars spent on these plays are unknown, but 4,000 plays in two months is not much. Interestingly, when we saw half a dozen reproductions of the Samsung ad in an hour, the same channel only ran the Pixel ad once. The results speak for themselves as well. In an operator survey, Wave7 found Samsung with 25% control on most operators, but at best 3% for pixels.
The ad in question, seen below, boasts of the phone’s video streaming capability of $ 499, emphasizing the phone’s 5G support.
This “Smooth Stream” Pixel ad, at least in my opinion, is very poor. It’s slow, a little boring, and focuses on one point of the Pixel 4a 5G that, frankly, most people won’t notice or worry about. 5G is definitely a good buzzword for marketing, not one that Google should simply ignore, but the Pixel has better points to take to consumers.
The 4a 5G would be much better off focusing its advertising dollars on its affordable price or, better, on its class-leading camera, solid battery and useful software features. Last month, we highlighted the story of a Pixel user who was saved from hours of suffering, and potentially much worse, because the Car Crash Detection feature on his Pixel came into action. Google Assistant alone is a treasure trove of advertising features with Call Screen for spam calls, hold on to me to manage the queue waiting and more. Hell, Google still has a better version of Samsung’s photo feature. Instead of capturing photos from 8K video frames, Pixel can pull a different version of the same photo, potentially avoiding a blurred photo or a moving object. Google Recorder would be another killer feature to advertise.
This is a long way from saying that Google is doing a poor job of the state of its current advertising. When I tweeted about it In early March, the idea that an operator was pushing the 5G angle was quickly raised. A good theory, but the truth is that Google was just behind this ad, with its Google Fi service stamped at the end being proof of that.
“Smooth 5G Streams” will not sell phones. Useful features, good cameras and affordable prices yes. Google has all of those on the Pixel 4a, 4a 5G and its Pixel 5. However, these phones are struggling to succeed and advertising dollars are not helping much.
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