Across the board, Apple is winning in tech: the average American household has 2.6 Apple products. Why? People don’t choose Apple over Samsung for the specs, they choose Apple because of what the brand stands for. Our research showed that consumers connected strongly to Apple’s cool, creative brand image disregarding Samsung’s feature superiority. After 50 years of classic ads like ‘Think Different,’ to sponsoring Halftime shows, to owning their own music and TV streaming services, Apple has become synonymous with creativity. Samsung needs to overcome this gap in brand love, if we are to grow. Unexpectedly, Apple helped us out. When they launched their ad “Crush” for their new iPad on May 7th, 2024, it became their biggest advertising blunder in years. The film showed beautiful analog creative tools & instruments - guitars, pianos, paint, easels - being crushed in a giant compactor into the slim form factor of a thinner iPad. All of humanity’s creativity was being replaced by a corporation’s lifeless technology. As angry tweets and memes from the creative community flooded the internet, we knew we had to act fast. We knew tablets don’t actually compete with IRL creativity. Instead, Galaxy owners use Tabs for their analog hobbies from cooking to learning DIY skills. That became our strategy: show the world that Galaxy believes tech exists to assist people with their real-world passions, not replace them. We drafted up a script on a Friday, shot over the weekend, and got our response live one week after the iPad ad debuted, under $20K. The film’s concept was simple: pick up right where the Apple ad left off. Our hero talent came into the empty warehouse where Apple crushed so many beloved creative tools and instruments. She picked up a broken guitar off the ground to defiantly play a song amid Apple’s destruction - using her Tab S9 to display sheet music aiding, not replacing her creativity. It ended with the line “Creativity cannot be crushed,” proving that even when the world tries to destroy creativity, creativity always finds a way. By seizing Apple’s gaffe with our UnCrush response, we changed the conversation: *61M total impressions and 85 different headlines, all with zero media investment *+58,454% increase in engagements over our benchmarks *Shifted the “Proud to Own” perceptions of Samsung to overtake Apple that quarter For the first time in years, we made people think different about Apple and see Samsung as a champion of creativity.