Samsung Canada is leaning into the foldable screen drama with a new ad campaign that puts bright crack-like lines across polished lifestyle photos, according to Samsung in an email to iPhone in Canada on Friday. The company says the creative is “making a playful reference to the latest developments in the foldable market”, without ever naming Apple or the iPhone Duo.
That wink is hard to miss. Early Duo owners have reported inner displays cracking along the centre crease, sometimes within hours of setup, and Apple has a team looking into it. Samsung’s posts never say any of that out loud. They just show the line.
One carousel slide opens with a child and a dog in the grass, cut by a thin vertical crease and a glowing horizontal bar that looks a lot like the white and coloured lines Duo owners have shared online. The caption is short: “Folding is nothing new to us.”
Another frame puts the same treatment over a girl biting into a frosted donut, with the line “Folding. We know a thing or eight.” A third tips a spiral staircase into green and cyan glow and closes with “Switch to Galaxy Z Fold8.” The posts went up on Instagram and TikTok on Thursday, and Samsung says mobile billboards will roll through Toronto and Vancouver on Friday, then Montreal over the weekend.
Commenters clearly got the joke. One wrote, “Hahah we love Samsung for this! 😂” Another asked, “I Wonder who made that screens,” leaving readers to fill in the blank. A third simply replied, “@samsungcanada post this bro.”
The timing lines up with a rough first week for Apple’s foldable. Owners have described a crunch while unfolding, then a crack along the crease and a bump under the glass, and reports of cracked Duo screens kept stacking up after launch weekend. A later look at the hinge pointed to stress near the centre support, which may explain why the damage keeps showing up in the same spot on brand-new units with green lines.
Samsung, for its part, is eight generations into the Galaxy Z Fold 8 line and is happy to remind people of that with a slogan that counts them out loud. The email frames the whole push as experience over novelty, and the photography is meant to look like everyday phone ads until the crack line ruins the polish.
Samsung has been doing this for over a decade. In 2011 it launched “The Next Big Thing Is Already Here”, a campaign that mocked people lining up for iPhones while Galaxy owners walked past, and it kept that line running through Super Bowl ads and later iPhone launches into 2013.
By 2017 the company was still at it with “Growing Up”, a spot that walked through a decade of iPhone gripes from storage limits to headphone dongles before the hero switched to a Galaxy Note. A year later its “Ingenius” ads jabbed at the iPhone X notch, and in 2020 Samsung mocked Apple for dropping the charger from the iPhone 12 box, then deleted those posts when it prepared to do the same.
Foldables became the favourite punchline after that. Samsung’s 2022 “On the Fence” Galaxy Z Flip ads urged hesitant iPhone users to jump, and its U.S. account posted “Let us know when it folds” after the iPhone 14 launch, then revived the same jab through later launches. Friday’s crack-line ads are the latest entry in that long list.
Would a billboard with a fake screen crack make you stop and stare, or would it just send you back to checking your own foldable twice?
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Samsung released phones about 10 years ago that had exploding batteries. So they should stay quiet.
Apple had bendgate, antennagate,…. now this!!