Samsung embraces political correctness for, um, Christmas
Commentary: Samsung's holiday ad features a doorman who embraces all creeds in spectacular ways.
Technically Incorrect offers a slightly twisted take on the tech that's taken over our lives.
And all you got me was a phone?
Oh, those tech companies.
They preach diversity, but the reality is a little less all-embracing than some might hope.
So what are they supposed to do when the holidays come along?
For its part, Apple presented a couple dancing away and sharing AirPods. Because sharing your AirPods is the first step to world harmony.
Samsung, however, has decided to be more overt. Its new Christmas ad isn't strictly a Christmas ad.
It presents an apartment building doorman who doesn't just put up tinsel for the Christian end-of-year celebration.
He knows he has people from many different religions in his building. So he decorates for each faith, in painstaking style.
What on earth, you might ask, does this have to do with Samsung?
The music offers the first clue. It's about giving a little love. How can you show your love, oh wealthy people who live in fancy apartment buildings? Why, by noticing that your ever-friendly, diversity-embracing doorman has a phone that comes from the dark ages.
Here, the residents get together to buy their doorman the one phone that truly expresses love. Stunningly, it's a Galaxy S8.
Cynical minds, or those who have just lived in New York for too long, will sniff that this doorman was going out of his way to please everyone so he'd get bigger end-of-year tips.
And, from my time in a New York apartment building, the tips the doormen expected were rather greater than the cost of a Galaxy S8. From each apartment, that is.
Let's not quibble, though.
Samsung is gently reminding us that all the nastiness of the year, all the racial and religious carping, is, at heart, inhuman. It's not as if any of us has all the right answers. Or even any of them.
We're all largely clueless beings, so why can't we just respect each other?
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