By now you’ve probably seen the Samsung Galaxy commercial where Mrs. Claus phone bumps a naughty video to Santa as he’s taking off on his sleigh. Hopefully you haven’t. But here’s the spot, which gets my vote for the worst commercial of 2012.
The ad is a takeoff on a Samsung commercial from earlier this year where a father is going away on a business trip. As he’s leaving, his kids tell him they’ve made him a video that he should watch on his plane, and because Samsung is touting its completely ridiculous feature where content is transferred by touching phones together and hitting a button*, his wife bumps him the video. Then she tells him she’s made him a video too, but that he should not watch it while he’s on the plane. The implication is that she’s made him some sort of NSFW video, which given the circumstances can only be one of a few things (we’ll let you do the math), none of which seem like they should be the focus of a commercial. But fine. Phone bump your adult vids and leave the rest of us out of it.
But they couldn’t. With the new spot — which recasts Santa as the father, two of his elves as the children and Mrs. Claus as the implied amateur pornographer — Samsung gets right in our face and forces us to confront the idea of Mrs. Claus, as pure and wholesome symbol of childhood innocence as there is, making a sex tape for Santa. Look, I’m not trying to deny Mr. and Mrs. Claus a healthy sex life. But they’re not real, they’re characters. And there’s no reason to sexualize them.
Is there any harm done by the commercial? No. It’s just a really bad ad that goes somewhere it shouldn’t (all in the service of a lame technology, no less). Here’s to hoping they stop before they film a follow-up with the Easter Bunny.
* Samsung seems really proud of this phone bumping technology, but isn’t physically touching phones to send information a gigantic step backward? Imagine a world where the only way to pass information would be to physically be in the same place with someone and essentially hand it to them. This is pre-Pony Express we’re talking about. If a wife wants to send her husband a lurid video — of if Mrs. Claus wants to send Santa a selfie tape — there’s a way to do that. It’s called email. Or text. Remember those things?
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