Samsung has removed a commercial from its YouTube channel after viewers complained that the advertisement was insensitive.
The South Korean tech giant’s “Don’t Give Up on Puppy Love!” advertisement showed a bunch of people getting fed up with their computers and taking their anger out in physical form.
Think violent bashings of the keyboard, people throwing monitors and hard drives off a cliff. Standard stuff: one guy shot his screen with a bow and arrow. A woman smashed her laptop with a shoe.
The only problem was that the computers weren’t just dumb, inanimate pieces of plastic. They were dressed up as puppies, given ears and arms and two eyes and a snout—something done to, as the Los Angeles Times opines, convey the sentiment that “your old computer is like a cute puppy, and just as it is appalling and cruel to kill a puppy, it is also cruel to do that to your computer.”
That in and of itself may be true, but it wasn’t a comparison that sat well with YouTube viewers.
YouTubers quickly sprung into action opposing the video, calling it “wrong” and pleading with the company to “show it to a kid and see the reaction.”
“Come on, how could you?” that same YouTube user asked. “did you see the face of the yellow puppy as it was bashed? oh COME ON.”
“Never throwing a piece of technology out again as I will keep seeing dog faces on them,” another viewer wrote.
Samsung pulled the video Monday evening, though its exact reasoning is still unclear. This morning,
Photo via Schlüsselbein/Flickr