Samsung’s use of the ice bucket challenge for ALS motor neurone disease awareness to highlight the water resistant nature of the Galaxy S5 has come under fire for turning a charity campaign into a marketing stunt.
Samsung’s Galaxy S5 smartphone isn’t water proof, but it certainly has an IP57 water resistant rating making it the perfect digital companion for anytime a bucket of icy water and ice cubes is dunked over your head.
One of Samsung’s marketing people in its UK offices decided to showcase the Galaxy S5’s water resistant nature by jumping onto the ALS ice bucket bandwagon, drenching the S5 as it speaks in its computerised assistant voice, noting how cold the water is and issuing a challenge to competitors.
The video can be seen at YouTube here and the embedded video above, with the video’s description stating: “We are calling out all of our followers for the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. Our Galaxy S5 just did it for the Motor Neurone Disease Association. Donate here www.mndassociation.org”, so at least Samsung has done the right thing in asking its followers to donate.
Samsung’s video challenged its biggest current competitors, the iPhone 5s, the HTC One M8 and the Nokia Lumia 930 to do the same, none of which are water resistant, and all of which could suffer serious water damage if they took part in the same stunt without a properly waterproof case.
While the whole thing sounds like a bit of clever marketing, there has been a backlash online, criticising Samsung for trivialising the awareness campaign just to sell more products.
Tweets seen online include one from Zeyad Mukhtar (@o_zuze) on August 22, 2014 saying: “#Samsung turns #IceBucket Challenge into ad mocking #iPhone” http://t.co/6ARIsqG89r
and another from Shervin A. Fazel (@ShervinFazel) on August 22, 2014 stating: “#Samsung takes the #ALS #Icebucket challenge, but does so for shameful #marketing promotion. http://t.co/zQlxEYOl1B”.
Some will say there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but it’s clear the stunt has a lot of people talking, with ice bucket bandwagon clearly set to roll on for some time yet.
