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Samsung’s Oscars ads are basically a promise that its phones won't explode anymore

Samsung’s Oscars ads are basically a promise that its phones won't explode anymore

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Samsung aired three new commercials during the Academy Awards tonight, continuing the company’s recent trend of using Oscars airtime to try and sell phones. But this year’s ads also served as a not-so-subtle promise that the Galaxy Note 7’s exploding battery last year was just a fluke.

“Quality is our priority,” says the first commercial, made by the company whose smartphones once posed a flight risk. The second focuses on Samsung’s 8-point battery safety check, winking heavily at the fact that a battery that’s gone through such rigorous inspections probably won’t set fire to your Levi’s.

The last presents popular YouTubers like Casey Neistat and “shitty robot” inventor Simone Giertz as the creators of the future.

Samsung usually goes big at the Oscars — last year, the company put William H. Macy in a Gear VR and in 2015 Ellen DeGeneres took a sponsored selfie — but this year’s commercials show a new focus on less traditional forms of celebrity... and a renewed focus on phones that don’t explode.