Samsung’s Galaxy Gear Advertising ⇥ thenextweb.com

I’ve seen much being made of the similarity between Samsung’s Galaxy Gear advertising and Apple’s first iPhone ad. Both are supercuts of various film characters interacting with the historical precedent of the product. Normally, I’d agree. In this case, however, Apple’s ad is based on Christian Marclay’s film “Telephones”:

The film focused to comment on the relationship between sound and image by way of video; intrigued by the phone-movie mashup, Apple approached Marclay to use his work. Marclay, of course, refused Apple’s advances, but Apple took advantage anyway. Since asking the source had short-circuited, Apple instead took to using extremely similar footage, making the iPhone commercial nothing short of a complete color copy of Telephones.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Samsung’s “inspiration” for their ads was Apple: that’s par for the course for them. But it’s important to understand the full context of these series of ads and films before hopping on Twitter to cry “ripoff”.