Samsung’s bizarre new ad pressures Apple to support RCS: ‘We’re bubbles too’

Samsung is apparently joining Google’s ongoing “Get The Message” ad campaign calling on Apple to adopt RCS. In a new ad posted to YouTube this week, Samsung claims that “green bubbles and blue bubbles want to be together.”

RCS is the open messaging standard created by Google to replace SMS and offers a handful of iMessage-style features. Apple, however, isn’t keen on adopting the open standard.

The new 30-second attempts to play on Romeo and Juliet, and in this situation the iPhone user is apparently Juliet and the Android user is Romeo. The idea is that Juliet’s parents, Apple in this bizarre world, won’t let her talk to Romeo via RCS. Instead, they have to resort to communicating via green bubbles.

Make sense? Probably not. It’s a truly weird and confusing ad that you probably wouldn’t understand at all out of context. If it weren’t for the title of the YouTube video, I probably wouldn’t have put two and two together, either.

The ad is literally just a screen recording of a conversation in the messages app on a Samsung device. I’m guessing the budget for this one was a cool $3. “Don’t let Apple cost you love,” Samsung says in the video’s description.

Some of the comments on the YouTube video are pretty hilarious:

“Juliets parents know that Apple users make better partners than Green bubble Romeos so it’s for the best really. Juliet will thank her parents in 10 years. Over FaceTime.”

“Funny stuff here: Google launched so many (closed) messaging apps which all failed terribly – and now they want to be adopted in the Apple ecosystem, too scared to be left behind”

“Just get an iPhone”

“Enough of this bullshit, it won’t happen. Move on.”

Google’s long-running “Get The Message” ad campaign doesn’t appear to have moved the needle in the slightest. Apple has shown no signs of adopting RCS and instead continues to use basic SMS alongside iMessage.

Last year, when asked about RCS by a customer who couldn’t send his mother certain videos because she uses an Android phone, Apple CEO Tim Cook told him to “buy your mom an iPhone.”

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