The upcoming spot focuses on Google’s latest smartphone’s ‘Magic Eraser’ and ‘Photo Unblur’ features, allowing users to unblur noise in photos, or delete/change the color of objects in their pictures. The ad runs 90 seconds and will air sometime during the second quarter of the big game.
See the full ad below:
It shows users erasing various mishaps from their photos. They go about deleting everything from a goofy sibling to even that one ex they probably want to forget about, all set to Missy Elliot’s “We Run This.”
The Super Bowl spot even features appearances from comedian Amy Schumer, rapper Doja Cat, and NBA superstar Giannis Antetokounmpo.
This comes as the second year in a row that Google spotlighted its smartphone line at the Super Bowl. Last year, the tech giant employed the talents of Lizzo for a commercial focused on the Pixel 6’s Real Tone feature.
Super Bowl ds centered on their hardware have been uncommon for Google. The company usually opts to use the advertising time to promote its software and services.
Samsung Canada dropped a new brand campaign to highlight how its ecosystem of devices can help Canadians connect.
In a video spot from Samsung, Toronto Raptors shooting guard Fred VanVleet uses Samsung tech to connect with up-and-coming Canadian basketball star Deniya Prawl. Samsung hooked VanVleet up with a Galaxy Z Fold 4, Neo QLED 8K TV “and some other Samsung products” to surprise Prawl, who’s rocking a similar TV set-up but with the Galaxy Z Flip 4 instead.
The pair hop into a game of what appears to be Halo Infinite for a few minutes before VanVleet calls Prawl with Google Duo to ask her a series of questions about basketball. While on the call, VanVleet walks down to the room where Prawl is to introduce himself.
The whole video is meant to highlight how Samsung devices, like TVs and phones, work together. For example, when VanVleet calls Prawl, the incoming call appears on her Samsung TV.
You can watch the video above or at the link here.
Google Canada dropped an ad for the Pixel 7 featuring Toronto Raptors forward (and NBA Rookie of the Year) Scottie Barnes touring Toronto and showing off the company’s new smartphone.
Unsurprisingly, the Pixel 7’s camera chops are on full display as Barnes pauses to snap pictures throughout Toronto. The ad flips back and forth between showing Barnes’ perspective walking through the city and raising the phone to snap pictures, then cycling through those pictures.
The ad shows recognizable aspects of Toronto, like the city’s red and white street cars, grungy subway, someone dressed for Caribana, the CN Tower and tons of Raptors fans.
Keen-eyed viewers might also notice the various placements for Bell throughout the ad, including a digitally altered Bell signal in the Pixel 7’s status bar (which happens to be on the wrong side of the phone) and a white car with lines sporting Bell’s signature blue. There’s even what appears to be an edited bus stop advertisement in the background of one of the photos (it could be real, but I’ve never seen a bus stop ad that clean in my life).
You can check out the ad on YouTube. Or, if you’re curious to learn more about Google’s new smartphones, check out our Pixel 7 review here, and Pixel 7 Pro review here. Alternatively, you can read the Pixel Watch review here.
If you were hunting for another reason not to use Spotify for podcasts, the streaming platform may have just delivered one on a silver platter. The company is adding new ‘call-to-action’ cards that are effectively visual advertisements linked to the audio ads you’d typically hear while listening to a podcast.
Spotify announced the new cards on Thursday via a blog post and confirmed to Gizmodothat the cards would be available across the desktop, mobile and tablet apps. For now, the ads won’t appear in web browsers, and to start the cards will only show up on Spotify Original and Exclusive podcasts in the U.S.
As for how these ads work, well, it’s pretty straightforward. When an ad starts playing in a podcast on Spotify, a small card pops up in the app with the brand name, some information and a clickable button that takes users to the advertiser’s website. These ads will show up for both free and paid users.
Further, Spotify will resurface the call-to-action cards for users who listen to an ad with the app closed or their phone screen off. For example, if you listen to a podcast while doing the dishes, you might see the call-to-action card next time you open Spotify and look at that show’s page.
To be clear, I’m not against advertising. It pays the bills for a lot of content creators and podcasts have relied on ads for monetization for some time. But so far, most podcasts advertise by reading ad copy (or playing pre-recorded audio) to listeners. Ads are contained to the show and usually to a specific ad segment at the beginning, middle and/or end.
My concern with Spotify’s approach is that it pulls the ads out of the show, which could open the floodgates for some of the scummier advertising practices that have run rampant on the web — for example, tracking and ad targeting. Additionally, the call-to-action cards add extra clutter to Spotify’s already less-than-stellar podcast interface. Oh, and serving the ads to paid Spotify subscribers is also frustrating since people pay to not have ads.
That said, there are some benefits to Spotify’s approach to ads. As the company points out in its blog post, most podcasts rely on special URLs or promo codes for ads — Spotify’s call-to-action cards remove the need for listeners to remember these codes since they can just click the card instead. And for advertisers, Gizmodo notes that Spotify found when testing call-to-action cards that they doubled site visits compared to non-clickable podcast ads.
Pixel 6 and 6 Pro leaks have been relatively scarce compared to previous Google phones, but as the search giant’s October 19th event approaches, the leaks have increased substantially.
First, leaker Evan Blass (@evleaks) posted a lengthy thread of high-res images and renders of both phones on Twitter. The images include renders of the Pixel 6 and 6 Pro in all three colours, renders of some cases for the phones and lifestyle shots with people holding the phones. We haven’t seen some of the pictures before, but if you’ve been following the Pixel 6 series closely since Google’s semi-reveal earlier this year, there shouldn’t be any surprises in this leak.
Next up, leaker ‘Snoopy’ (@_snoopytech_) posted a Pixel 6 series ad on Twitter (via 9to5Google). The roughly 30-second ad focuses on the new Tensor chip and shows off several features powered by it. Those with a keen eye will spot some of the new Android 12 clock and weather widgets, what appears to be a redesigned ‘Now Playing’ widget and a ‘Magic Eraser’ feature.
In the ad, Magic Eraser appears as a suggestion chip in Google Photos — the user taps the chip, and it highlights a person in the background of a selfie and then removes that person from the image.
Further, the leaked ad shows off ‘Live Translate’ in a conversation between two people, in Google’s Messages app and in pictures, although the latter appears to be existing Google Lens functionality. The impressive part comes after, where the ad claims that there’s “no internet required” for the feature.
Finally, the ad shows off the new ‘Security Hub,’ which Google bills as a helpful way to protect your “digital life.”
All in all, the ad makes the Pixel 6 series look rather impressive. We’ll likely learn more about all these features on October 19th and real-life tests from reviewers soon after will show how well the features actually work.
As with other recent ads from Intel, this one picks a few areas to bash Apple computers over that, again, have almost nothing to do with the processor inside the computer. Those areas include customizing your computer, gaming, having two touchscreens and 2-in-1 form factors.
What makes this ad particularly annoying is Intel uses the classic ‘put people in a room to tell them about one thing, then reveal you were talking about something else’ format. Several of the people in the ad act completely shocked at various “innovative new features,” even though most have been around for a while.
The ad’s fine print notes that they are “real people paid for their time and opinions,” but nobody speaks like these people. One person loudly exclaims they are “100 percent loyal to Apple” and another looks at an RGB gaming rig and calls it “artwork.”
Before I get too much deeper into this, I want to acknowledge a few things. First, it’s entirely possible that people who don’t spend their days writing about tech wouldn’t know about some of these features. However, anyone that has shopped for a laptop in at least the last five years would know about 2-in-1s and multi-touchscreen computers. Plus, PC gaming has been around basically as long as the computer has.
The other thing I want to say is that I hope the criticisms I lay out here don’t come off as favouring either company. I wouldn’t call myself a fan of Intel or Apple — I have no allegiance to either one, and as far as the processor in my computer goes, it doesn’t matter to me as long as it works (and works well).
Intel’s “benefits” don’t have anything to do with the CPU
That said, Intel’s arguments against Apple computers are foolish. Let’s break them down, starting with the computer customization angle. Intel implies in the ad that people can buy a PC and freely swap out the hardware — for example, upgrade the RAM if they need more. That may be the case with some computers, but chances are if you walk into a Best Buy and purchase a laptop, you won’t be able to upgrade the components inside it. On the other hand, Apple is arguably worse in this regard since it puts the RAM and processor on the same chip. While that yields performance benefits, it also kills the potential for future upgrades.
But let’s be honest — Apple was never keen on letting people upgrade the parts in old Intel-powered Macs. Making it more difficult for people to upgrade computers with Apple Silicon is just Apple backing up a long-held stance.
Next up, dual touchscreens and 2-in-1 formatting. I’m going to lump these together because neither has anything to do with the processor. Apple doesn’t offer either of these form factors because, as far as I can tell, it doesn’t want to. The company has staunchly kept the iPad and MacBook lines separate despite continuously marketing the iPad Pro as a laptop replacement. I know the M1 chip isn’t a factor here because it currently powers both the latest MacBook and the latest iPad Pro — Apple Silicon could power some iPad-Mac hybrid device if Apple chose to make one.
I also know Intel’s chips aren’t at fault for this because several Windows 2-in-1s use the company’s hardware. Again, if Apple had wanted to make an iPad-Mac hybrid running on an Intel chip, it could have.
Also, I doubt Apple will ever put two screens on a MacBook. The company has always portrayed itself as a stickler for design, and every dual-screen laptop I’ve seen tosses good design out the window to squeeze in that extra display.
Apple’s M1 chip didn’t ruin gaming on Mac — it already sucked
Finally, the gaming argument. Yes, the hardware in your computer matters when gaming, but it’s also not the reason why Macs suck for gaming. Hardware impacts gaming in two ways — it determines first if you can even play a game, and second how good the game looks. That first part really comes down to game developers and what platforms they target — most of them develop games for Windows PCs, which primarily use Intel or AMD CPUs.
If a game developer wanted, they could totally build a game for an ARM-powered device, such as Apple’s M1 MacBook. But they don’t. Even when MacBooks ran on Intel hardware, developers didn’t make many games for them. Largely, this was because the player base on Apple computers was so small that the cost of porting to Mac didn’t make sense. I imagine the move to ARM-based chips didn’t help in that regard, but it’s definitely not the reason Macs suck for gaming.
Perhaps the worst part of Intel’s ad is that none of these features Intel boasts about are Intel-exclusive. The Vergepointed out that there are AMD-powered options with the features Intel touted as benefits of Intel-powered PCs. Plus, AMD is closing the market-share gap between it and Intel — maybe Intel should be focusing on something other than attacking Apple.
Seems like today is a day for trailers. First, Google dropped the Pixel 6 trailer, and then the new Matrix trailer arrived. Now, it’s Microsoft’s turn with a short teaser for Windows 11 featuring Master Chief.
The short ad features an actress walking through halls of apps, touching things to interact with them. First, she goes into the Xbox Game Pass app and starts Halo Infinite, which brings Master Chief into the ad. He blasts a banshee out of the sky with a rocket launcher, kick-starting the transition into the Windows 11 widgets interface.
From there, the actress looks up hummingbirds, then leaps into a Teams chat via the new taskbar integration in Windows 11. We briefly see the fancy new Windows 11 wallpaper before transitioning to a dance video. Finally, we see the actress back at her computer watching the dance video and opening a Teams call using Windows 11’s new window management system.
Overall it’s a nice little ad that does a decent job showing off some of what’s new in Windows 11. However, I wonder if people who don’t follow Windows news will get all the little hints about features peppered throughout.
