The archive · Advertising · Marketing decision · 2022
Samsung's 'The Spider and the Window' sells the S22 Ultra camera as a spider's love story
To sell the Galaxy S22 Ultra's camera, Leo Burnett Germany tells the launch film from a spider who falls in love with the phone's lens.
Samsung Electronics
What it had to solve
The Galaxy S22 Ultra launch needed a film that made the phone's camera capabilities feel remarkable. Leo Burnett Germany's route was not another spec demo but a larger brand story told with emotion.
How it works
The Galaxy S22 Ultra launch needed a film that made the phone's camera capabilities feel remarkable — the usual route would have been a spec demo of sensors and zooms. Leo Burnett Germany instead treated the film as a larger brand story.
The result, 'The Spider and the Window', is told from the unique perspective of a spider. The spider sees an advert for the Galaxy S22 Ultra through a window and falls in love with the phone, because its camera lenses resemble the eyes of a spider; the story ends happily for the spider.
The camera's capability is never listed — it is felt through the spider's infatuation, and the product film becomes a love story with a phone as the beloved. The work is filed in the D&AD awards archive with Leo Burnett Germany credited as lead.
Why it lands
- Giving the camera a character that falls in love with it turns a spec into an emotion the viewer shares.
- The spider's-eye perspective is native to the product claim: the lenses look like spider eyes, so the story and the feature are the same idea.
- An emotional story is retellable, so the launch film keeps working long after the first viewing.
- Framing a phone launch as a fairy tale differentiates the S22 Ultra from rivals that demonstrate cameras with spec-heavy films.
What it did
Instead of listing camera specs, the launch film makes the capability felt through the spider's infatuation, and it is recorded in the D&AD awards archive with Leo Burnett Germany credited as lead. No view or sales figures appear in the archive entry.
What you can take
When a product's defining trait is invisible in a still, give it a character who would fall for it — the feature becomes a story people feel instead of specs they skip.
Since then
The film ran with the Galaxy S22 Ultra's 2022 launch and is recorded in the D&AD awards archive with Leo Burnett Germany credited as lead. The archive entry carries no view or sales figures, so the case rests on the mechanism: demonstrating a camera by letting a character love it.
Sources
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