Samsung builds some of the best phones, TVs, and connected appliances on the planet. But the company all too frequently undermines this excellence by cramming ads into system apps, home screens, and yes, even on-device displays in your appliances. Something’s just fundamentally broken when the $1,000 phone or even a $2,000 TV starts to feel like you sponsored a billboard.
Ads are accepted on the open web and inside free services. They’re not welcome in the core software of high-quality hardware—particularly through push notifications, full-screen promos, or banners disguised as system menu options. That is the line Samsung continues to overstep.
Premium phones with bargain-bin ad tactics undermine value
Samsung’s phones are repeat offenders. Owners regularly stumble upon marketing alerts from preinstalled Samsung apps—pitches to buy new Galaxy watches or phones, or discounted games. You can hunt through settings to mute a lot of them, but the stance by default is advertise first and apologize afterward.
Cleaner fare is not served in the in-app experience. On opening, Samsung Wallet has full-screen ads and the home view is peppered with cash-back placements. Promos and pop-ups are also a regular bang in your face at Galaxy Store. In a handful of markets, Samsung even teams up with lock-screen content providers who serve up ads and “stories” where you’d expect nothing but the time and your notifications.
Contrast that with competitors. Pixels and iPhones aren’t ad-free ecosystems, but they certainly don’t have the manufacturer shoving in-your-face marketing via system apps or notifications. There’s also a distinction between ads shoved in your face as part of a third-party store, and ads surfacing from the brand you’ve just waltzed out of four figures to support.
TVs and smart fridges are not billboards for advertising
Samsung’s smart TVs do the same thing. Banner tiles and sponsored rows clog the Tizen home screen more and more now, no matter which streaming app you’re actually browsing. The high-end models’ owners have been griping for years about ads that seem to be stitched into the interface itself, not just into ad-supported content.
And then there are the refrigerators. Samsung has admitted that screens on its smart fridges can show advertisements when placed in the correct mode. These are from appliances that begin at laptop-level cost and can exceed $3,000. A kitchen screen that assists with lists and timers is helpful; a kitchen screen that nags you for promos is intrusive.
This isn’t accidental drift. Samsung has a global ad business—Samsung Ads—that boasts reach across hundreds of millions of smart TVs and connected devices. The incentives are obvious. Yet when ads are allowed to splatter across fundamental UI components on premium hardware, the transient financial gain is prioritized over long-term user satisfaction.
Ads here chip away at trust — and the product’s value
There’s already ample evidence that intrusive promotions erode satisfaction. In Forrester’s Customer Experience research, perceived control and ease are always significantly correlated predictors of loyalty, whereas effortful interruptions and clutter deflates scores. In their documentation, Nielsen Norman Group has identified that interstitial website elements are among the most irritating patterns in digital design.
Consumers will put up with ads if the value exchange is clear—free service in return for their attention. That’s why Deloitte’s Digital Media Trends series of reports continues to top out with “too many ads” as one of the main reasons people are increasingly fleeing from ad-supported services. When the “service” in question is a device that you could’ve put more than a mortgage payment toward, and yet it never really materialized, the transaction feels unbalanced and resentment sticks to the brand.
A new playbook for Samsung: consent, control, and choice
Samsung doesn’t have to eschew advertising completely. It’s got to change how it shows up. Begin with consent: Publish devices in a way that all marketing messages and promotional layouts are turned off by default, then ask explicitly for permission post-setup, explaining clearly with plain language—not pre-checked boxes or bundled toggles.
Provide control: a front-door switch (“Ad-Free Device Experience”) that upends marketing elements throughout system apps, home screens, screen savers, and lock screens. No scavenger hunts through submenus. No exceptions for “house ads.”
Real choice: tangibly discounted “with offers” phones, and an option to pay once to remove it, something e-readers innovated ten years ago. People understand that trade. What they’re not willing to accept is paying top dollar and still getting monetized like a free user.
The bottom line: respect purchases and stop default ads
Samsung’s hardware teams are capable of doing some seriously awesome work. That does not shine long when the software feels like a delivery vehicle for ads. Respect the purchase. Don’t cram promos into core experiences by default. Let customers just choose in, not be billboards by default. Do that, and it will earn more loyalty than any ad campaign can purchase.