Samsung is adding ads to its $2,000 Family Hub refrigerator through a software update. The ads appear in an information widget alongside news and weather, and Samsung says they're contextual and don't track users. The move reflects a broader trend of advertisements appearing on expensive hardware consumers already paid for.
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Your $2,000 refrigerator now shows ads According to TechRadar, Samsung has begun rolling out a US software update that puts advertising on the screens of its family hub smart refrigerators. The ads appear inside a new day to day information widget alongside news, calendars and weather. Samsung says the screens will serve contextual or non personal ads and that they're not collecting personal information or tracking consumers. If you understand that you're smarter than I am, we'll dive into that more in no moment. The company has framed the move as enhancing everyday value for our home appliance, but early reaction has been, well, chilly. The update arrives as a notification asking users to opt in. Owners can later turn off ads in the fridge's settings under an advertisements tab or dismiss them on the COVID screen. Family Hum models typically cost around $2,000, which is why critics question adding an ad channel after purchase. As the Verge first spotted, this is part of a broader trend of ads creeping into devices from tablets to cars, raising a simple question. What exactly are we buying when hardware becomes a billboard? What's the real message here? Advertisements are coming for your refrigerator. You get up from the TV watching ads. You get out of chair from staring at your cell phone. From ads. You go to your fridge to get a glass of milk and there's going to be an ad right there. And make no moans about it. It's coming to all fridges because once one refrigerator company does it and they start getting a taste of that monthly recurring revenue from advertisers, everyone else is going to want a piece of the pie. Okay, let's dig a little bit deeper here. Now let me not be a hypocrite. I have ads. I make money from ads. You're seeing ads on this show. If you're listening to this on a podcast, ads are inserted. It's part of the deal. I don't charge you for my podcast or my YouTube content or TikTok content. And in exchange for me giving this to you, you're giving me your eyeballs or ears or both to listen to an ad, and advertisers give me some percentage of that. Now that's the way it's worked with radio and television for going on 100 years. Nothing completely surprising. What is different is when you spend a lot of money for an appliance and the manufacturers say it's not really enough money. We want money regularly. How can we make more money off now it's happening to television. You know, full disclosure, I do media training with the CEOs of some major television Companies, and they told me point blank that, hey, we can't make enough money just selling the hardware, the actual machine. The price goes down, down, down. But where we can make money is by selling the data to advertisers to put the right ad in front of the right customer at the right time. We can get ongoing revenue from every TV set we sell. Now, if it's one thing the modern stock market has shown us is investors really, really give priority to companies that have currying revenue. Google, YouTube, Apple. You know what's the beauty of Apple? They get money every single month from subscription. I'm staring at my Apple phone right here. I can't even tell you how many subscriptions they're making. Sell my tjwalker AI app through the App Store. They get a piece of every single sale. So I understand why companies do this and why, by the way, Samsung has TVs. I have a Samsung TV in fact. And they have ads that show up right on their own channels too. So every tech company is looking to make every single penny from every single source, and ads are a part of that. Now, before I just say all of this is always bad, and surveillance capitalism is always bad. And make no mistake, it often is. The refrigerator to me does seem like a place where there might be really useful ads if I know we're about to run out, or if I don't know we're about to run out of milk. But my smart refrigerator does. And the ad says, hey, tj, why don't you go to Publix later today and buy this favorite brand of low fat milk that your family likes. I might actually appreciate that. So I don't want to say that this is somehow uniformly an awful thing, but I do think we as consumers need to be aware of this. Every, every tech company says, oh, we got permission. And they give you this long consent form that's 150,000 words long that nobody has ever read. And if you don't opt out, boom, all of a sudden you're going to start getting all this content that you didn't really want ask for. Good luck ever figuring out how to opt out. Now some more facts. The family hub fridge starts around $2,000. And that to me sounds like a pricey fridge. Anyway, it seems like you should get all the goodies for free. I don't think we're yet at the point where the fridge, the refrigerators are going to sell you subscription services so you can watch short form entertaining video for 30 seconds when you're standing in front of the refrigerator, trying to figure out what you want for a late night snack. Although having said it, right now might put an idea in somebody's head. So I wouldn't be at all surprised if you saw that. So privacy. Samsung says the ads are contextual, non personal and not tracking users. I don't know if I really know what that means. I mean, I assume that means they're not saying, hey, TJ Walker at such and such address likes this kind of caviar. Start sending him direct mail that gives coupons to caviar. I'm assuming they mean they wouldn't do that, but does it mean that it's scanning my refrigerator? And so we don't know whose refrigerator this is, but we can see they normally have, you know, six cans of beer, 12 cans of beer, they're down to two. So are we going to send an ad to this fridge saying you better go buy beer? I don't know. Would that happen? Would it be seen as a good or bad thing? Let me know what you think. I would love to hear from you. If you're watching this live, and we do go live every single day, typically around 9am Eastern time here in the United States, Monday through Friday. On the weekends, it's more like 11 to 12 on week on weekend mornings. But if you are joining us live, whether on the podcast or any social media platform, you can always post your comments. Simon says these pretzels, these pretzels are making you thirsty. Okay, that might be a good ad for the refrigerator. And Keem says, on the fridge, exclamation point. Yeah, it is coming. Would you buy, here's my question to you. Would you buy a refrigerator that has ads built in? I mean, seeing the weather right there. You got a second? I don't know that that would bother me if it threw up my schedule if I wanted it to. It is a place where you're going and looking for a couple of seconds. I personally am frankly looking for more opportunities in life to not have any screen to look at. That's why as part of my own personal development program, it's actively spending some time each day where there are no screens either. Going for a walk for an hour a day, leaving the cell phone at home as I did yesterday, a bike ride for an hour, not even taking the cell phone because I'm a big believer that that is ultimately what's going to make you think more clearly, have more original thoughts, be more grounded, be less nervous, not getting this bombardment of news, information, text, things like that.
