Microsoft Makes Fun Of Samsung Heathrow Terminal

To promote its latest flagship smartphone at one of the busiest airports in the world Samsung inked an exclusive deal with the Heathrow in London. The airport’s Terminal 5 will be known as Terminal Samsung Galaxy S5 at least for the time this marketing campaign is in full swing. Thousands of passengers move through the terminal every single day which means that Samsung’s branding gets lot of eyeballs. Microsoft, which now owns Nokia’s devices and services division, sent some passengers to the terminal who took the branding a little too literally.

An entire story was posted on the Nokia Conversations blog, which is now run by Microsoft, about how “Lumianauts” were excited about reaching “the Galaxy” through Heathrow’s Terminal 5. Microsoft sent a bunch of folks dressed up as astronauts to the terminal to mock Samsung’s Galaxy-branding, and it cheekily pointed out that Lumia smartphones have been sent up to space twice in the last couple of years.

Obviously the Lumianauts were disappointed to see that there were no space flights to “the Galaxy” from Heathrow Terminal 5 and that the terminal had been taken over by advertising for another company. “With constellation map in-hand they bowed their heads in disappointment and rang HQ, ‘Microsoft…we have a problem.”

Even before it was acquired by Microsoft, Nokia’s devices business has had a knack of mocking its rivals. Looks like the team hasn’t given up on those habits after joining Redmond. Its all in good fun, but it would have cost Samsung significantly more to set this up than it did Microsoft to mock.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: Cellphones
Tags: Galaxy S5, lumia, Microsoft, Samsung