Newsletter
Europe’s busiest airport, Heathrow, sure seems to be in the news a lot lately, and for all the wrong reasons. Just a couple of weeks ago we ran an article reporting that Samsung was making use if its vast marketing budget by renaming Heathrow’s Terminal 5 to Terminal Galaxy S5. Samsung took charge of 172 digital signs and placing images of the S5 everywhere possible to put the image of their new flagship phone firmly in the minds of the passing travellers.
This promotion didn’t escape the attention of Nokia (now under the Microsoft Devices moniker), who decided to play Samsung at its own game by sending a group of four astronauts to ‘Terminal Galaxy 5’ to travel to ‘the Galaxy’. The Lumia-nauts, as they were called, were naturally disappointed to find out that instead of being taken to outer-space by a rocket-ship, that Terminal Galaxy S5 was rather just a marketing campaign by Samsung. As anyone would do, the Lumia-nauts posed for a few pictures in their spacesuits which were emblazoned with the Lumia Space Cadets logo and the American flag. To mark their disappointment they ‘bowed their heads in disappointment and rang HQ, “Microsoft…we have a problem.” No mention was made as to how the Lumia-nauts managed to get home, but I’m pretty sure they weren’t picked up by the Enterprise. Nokia even published a video to their Vine feed showing the Lumia-Nauts entering ‘Terminal Galaxy S5’.
In direct contrast to Microsoft’s negative Scroogled campaign, this was all very tongue-in-cheek, much like when Microsoft and Sony congratulated each other on the release of their respective Gaming consoles in late 2013. Its a welcome respite from the negative marketing we often see from Microsoft and other tech companies trying to get one over on their competitors. It’s doubtful this light-hearted trolling will have any impact at all on sales of the Galaxy S5, but it was good to see the Microsoft Devices division playing ‘nice’.
Let us know if you saw the Lumia-nauts in action at Heathrow’s 5 on the weekend either in our comments section below, or at our Google Plus page.
