It has absolutely happened with those things.
Cars: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sceLsLkQf7A
Fridges: https://fortune.com/2025/09/19/samsung-family-hub-refrigerat...
I'm not aware of a smart watch doing first-party ads yet.
Cars: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sceLsLkQf7A
Fridges: https://fortune.com/2025/09/19/samsung-family-hub-refrigerat...
I'm not aware of a smart watch doing first-party ads yet.
I think the main thing preventing it on the device itself is they haven't thus far needed a large screen to show them on.
They discontinued it for some elaborate "ThinQ" app which was designed to support a huge universe of different devices, and it was no longer something my parents could use.
I miss when phones had IR blasters; it was fun that I could control my old NAD 7100 reciever, which predated consumer smartphones by a good decade plus.
But the existence of a single crappy car establishes very definitively that a crappy car can and does exist.
Do you think Samsung's the only company that's gonna play with ads on their smart fridges?
https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/privacynotincluded/arti...
Our problem is that the used to be a huge middle segment, where you'd pay extra, but you got better quality. That middle segment has more or less disappeared, because it requires a fair bit of volume to be sustainable. Initially we, as in society, got lured in by cheaper prices, and reasonable quality, supported by savings in running super markets vs. a butcher, efficiency gains or subsidizes, maybe in the form of an ad here or there. Once we started expecting lower prices, quality started to go down, but restarting the "pay a little more, for better quality" segment isn't easy.
This is pure opinion, but I view that as the result of things like PE firms, activist investors, etc. who basically make the case "People respect $BRAND and think we're worth spending 30% more than the cheapest competitor. But what if we kept our prices exactly where they are, keep our advertising focused on how our tradition of quality is our whole reason for existing, but we shift production of our product/service to the same cheapest-possible way the cheap competitors do? At first this was a big gamble, as theoretically customers will notice when their car or their toaster starts falling apart in 4 years, instead of the 10 or 15 years the old one lasted, but this "Moneyballization" of most brands has been so pervasive across the whole marketplace that customers now can't choose "the brand that didn't do that" because ALL the brands did that (or were bought by a brand that does do that). So it's become a completely risk-free strategy.