If LG Electronics isn’t careful, it might get a reputation for bizarre marketing campaigns, such as the time it encouraged Koreans to shoot balloons from the sky to win a G2 (one woman brought a trident) or its decade-long sponsorship of the Cronulla Sharks.
The latest entry into this proud canon comes from the team at LG Benelux (Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg), who have created what must be the craziest, brow-furrowing, indiscernible advertisement in smartphone history. The ad is for LG’s new G Flex, a flexible handset, and it’s like Lars von Trier, David Lynch and Thom Yorke got together in a room with a bunch of first-time actors and disgruntled CGI technicians, mixed in some Dutch local produce and then pressed the record button:
There is some suggestion on the internet forums that this ad is meant to be bad; that it’s a stunt to gain publicity for the phone and to go viral. If that is the case, then UnderCurrent tips its hat to those clever folk at LG. It does, however, have the look and feel of a high concept effort gone horribly wrong; like the people making this ad though they were making Citizen Kane, or at least Weird Science. It reminds UnderCurrent of a certain calamity from LG’s fierce rivals, Samsung, from 2013: