Samsung has been dispensing with some serious cash of late on product placements and celebrity endorsements, if reports are to be believed. The latest celebrity to have now joined the pantheon of musicians, athletes and actors to either endorse the brand or have a Samsung product feature front and center in their videos or movies is singer and former child star Ariana Grande. Now, for the uninitiated, Ms. Grande, known for such hits as Problem, One Last Time, Break Free and Love Me Harder, has just come out with her brand new single ‘Focus’, and the music video for that number is now being talked about in tech-circles for featuring Samsung’s current generation flagship phablet, the Galaxy Note 5. The smartphone of course, features fairly prominently in the video, and the complete lack of subtlety in showing off the various features of the Note 5 through choreographed moves from the dancers hasn’t gone unnoticed in various circles.
The Galaxy Note 5 makes its very first appearance in the music video when Ms. Grande picks up the device to scribble the name of her single with the much talked about S-Pen, while the screen on the smartphone is still switched off, highlighting an admittedly impressive feature of the phone. Samsung also seems pretty proud of the selfie-cam on its latest phablet flagship, as it highlights the phone’s front-facing camera by having some of the backup dancers click selfies with the star in the video. Samsung of course, drew worldwide attention to the wide-angle selfie-cam on its Galaxy Note 3, when the host of last year’s Academy Awards ceremony, Ms. Ellen DeGeneres, used the device to take a selfie with a number of celebrities inside the Kodak Theater. The image, posted on Ms. DeGeneres’ Twitter account, went viral within an instant, and eventually became the single most re-tweeted post ever in the history of the social networking site.
The South Korean consumer electronics giant has also been lavishing sponsorship money on other popular musicians of late, if reports are to be believed. Just a few days back, Jay-Z’s Roc Nation, the home label for Barbados-born pop star Rihanna, was said to have inked a deal worth as much as $25 million to sponsor the singer’s upcoming world tour, in a deal said to be the largest ever of its kind in the history of the music industry.