HTC’s made a terrible ad for their brilliant phone

What is it with tech companies making appalling adverts? There was the bro-heavy LG one with the man snogging his own hand, the creepy-as-hell Samsung Gear ad, and now this poor effort from HTC:

Selling a pretend drug called Cellami, it’s clearly intended as a pastiche of the side-effect-laden TV ads for American pharmaceutical products, and in some places it’s almost funny. But in many, many more places, it’s cringe-tastically bad. Metallidone Boomsoundide? Samsung Affective Disorder? Irritable Operating System?! Come on, guys, this is beyond parody.

It’s also pretty obviously taking the mick out of depression, and goes so far as to suggest you “call your doctor if you experience… thoughts of cellacide.” Yeah, that’s just not funny.

And that bit at the end, where suddenly everything’s fine because “Your phone is the best!”? That’s the kicker. Because the HTC One M9 genuinely is a brilliant phone – and this ad does absolutely nothing to get that across. It’s like Baby’s First Viral, straight out of a graduate creative team’s portfolio of ‘wacky ideas’. You’re better than this, HTC. And so is the phone.