Too Dramatic Is Also A Problem

I remember we talked about how movies have sneaky product placement. We also talked about how there are movies where a product is presented to writers and told to build a story around it.

Well, this ad for the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 is a very good example of how a story is built around the product.

In the advertisement, a man narrates his life. He has an interactive job and exciting friends who he works with. Everyone is all smiles and up until he leaves work to go home, the man narrates for himself. It starts off as an ordinary drive home, until a motorcycle suddenly emerges from the left block and crashes into his car. In the next scene, all his friends (and I mean like 10 coworkers) march into the hospital with "Get Well Soon" balloons and an inflatable dressed up woman, with laughter and jokes. They all greet the man's mother who is sitting quietly outside with an obnoxious voice and it is only when they all turn to their left and see their friend through the window that only silence fills the air. Rather than seeing their friend laying back on the hospital bed with a lazy grin and just a harmless cast around his arm, they saw their black and purple spotted friend drinking soup with his left hand, because his right hand was missing. There were bloody bandages around the area of his missing body part. The friends eventually get the man's attention and they all have a very sincere and heartwarming exchange of messages.

How could the man reply back with only his nondominant hand, you ask? Because he was using the Samsung Galaxy Note 4, of course.

It's a very touching story, and a possibly true one. But I knew it was two minutes in, after the two parties had exchanged at least one message each, that I knew it was an ad for the phone.

Whether it was because of these media blogs or because the product use was too major in the plot, spotting out the true message of the commercial was fairly easy.

And personally, the story was great and the use of the phone was also great. BUT, it seemed like the plot was a bit too dramatic to simply end with a reference to Samsung Galaxy Note 4.