Should We All Be Outraged About Samsung Now Putting Digital Signage And DooH On Fridges? Nah.
November 5, 2025 by Dave Haynes
There has been all kinds of written and spoken pearl-clutching lately as word circulated in online tech publications that Samsung’s smart fridges had started using the built-in flat panel display to run what amounts to ad-supported digital signage.
My general take – yeah, whatever. There’s a software setting to turn the ads off.
The bigger question, in many ways, is why consumers would pay a premium for a refrigerator with a screen on its front face. It hits me as the sort of thing that happens when men get involved in the buying decision. Some quick online research reveals women tend to buy appliances that are reliable, efficient and look good in the kitchen, while men can be swayed by bling. I know … shocking.
Let’s go back to what’s happened here …
Samsung, along with numerous other major appliance manufacturers, has blinged-up a line of premium fridges, and boosted MSRPs in the process, by adding screens on fridge doors. The product line, called Family Hub, has units with screens that are either 21.5 inches or 32-inches. The fridges have smart home features, with cameras and AI-backed functionality like food management, calendar sharing, and multimedia.
The fridge screens have long supported stuff like family bulletin boards and digital photo albums, but a new widget on what are called Cover Screens displays information including news headlines, weather forecasts, and calendar events. Or what most people reading this would call digital signage. The benefits of having classic digital signage programming running on a fridge escape me, to begin with, given weather and news are not exactly elusive content. But it’s stuff in a library of options, similar to how many CMS software platforms have apps that can be launched to run that bulk up a programming plan.
The new widget also has “curated” advertising banners on certain Cover Screens, popping up when the flat panels are not being actively used … or what Samsung calls their idle state.
Samsung says specific ads can be dismissed for the brand’s campaign’s duration, and ads will not display when the cover screen is in Art Mode or showing picture albums. The ads can also be fully turned off, but Samsung explains some features like deals and limited time promos from itself or partners may not show, as well as “smart” suggestions on things like meal ideas. Core functions like tracking what’s in the fridge are unaffected, as are things like media playback – for people who somehow regard their fridges as great devices for playing out music or doom-scrolling Pinterest.
I don’t want ads or a digital sign in my kitchen. So I didn’t buy a fridge with a big-ass LCD embedded in the door. If you did, and were at least fleetingly sentient, it may have popped into your head that given how every other screen in your possession seems to have ads of some kind, this one will, too.
A Samsung QLED is my main way of watching TV at night. The damn thing is haunted. Super-weird stuff happens. But the visual quality, when it’s not having an episode, is awesome. So I keep it. Off to the bottom left of the navigation menu on my polterTV is an ad, which when I purposefully looked for it this morning was about hair products for women. Wrong gender for me, plus anyone who knows me knows hair is more of a historical discussion. Otherwise, I never look at the ads, and I suspect few people do. But we’re all aggregated eyeballs in some way, that roll up into a bigger thing that, for Samsung, is called Screens Everywhere.
That strategy involves embedding intelligent displays into all kinds of Samsung home appliances, working off the notion of overall smarter homes being connected by technology. A fridge is just the latest endpoint, albeit probably the most expensive one if you set aside super-premium TVs. Samsung’s smart, connected TV advertising business has more than 235 million endpoints, and by one estimate Samsung Ads generates north of $300 million in annual ad revenue. So it makes sense that the fridges are seen as more endpoints – though I’d imagine far, far more Samsung fridges are sold without screens, and that won’t shift much anytime soon in a shaky economy.
Back in 2015, research suggested the average person was exposed to between 2,000 and 5,000 digital ads – A DAY – in and around a home. That estimate is now 6,000 to 10,000 ads, those banners and videos increasingly targeted and driven by programmatic platforms. So one more screen – one more ad face – just doesn’t wind me up much. But I have read all kinds of posts on Reddit and elsewhere expressing outrage and how they’ll never buy another Samsung product.
Yeah, sure you won’t. Until Black Friday sales start up.
Brand marketing experts used to always reference the time when consumers are in store aisles making buying decisions as the moment of truth. That’s now called the zero moment of truth, because now there’s a first moment of truth at home when consumers are on their devices scanning for new products, deals and reviews. So screens everywhere is not a passing fancy. The opportunity, love it or hate it, is too powerful for brand marketers to ignore.
I’m not a fan of having ad banners pop up on a fridge. But of all the things I could get upset about these days, this ain’t one of them.
Unhappy? Go to settings and turn it off. Job done.
How is the party for news going? Blocking content unless pay generally results in your channel being dropped to a certain extent. AI has democratized news to large extent. Ads won’t work. AI assistant might
The fact that DOOH is somehow the closest term for ads running on refrigerator screens is pretty telling – if the screen is literally installed in your kitchen, it is most assuredly not Out-of-Home – right?!? I have long been arguing that we need to stop thinking about monetized content showing up on screens no matter where the screen is as DOOH – the reality is that screens take on the context of the space that they are located, and in many spaces, the permission structure to advertise randomly to any pair of eyeballs that happens to look at the screen just doesn’t exist. One of the biggest problems with digital advertising, and the reason that people are becoming mostly ad-blind on digital channels, is because the industry sort of agreed that we would just put ads into slots and as long as they didn’t get in people’s way when they were trying to do things, they would understand that ‘free’ isn’t ‘free’ – it’s just ‘ad-supported’. One of my greatest hopes for our industry is that we don’t somehow make the mistake of thinking that the same rules naturally apply to screens WHEREVER we put them – in grocery store aisles, or heaven forbid, in people’s kitchens. There is a time and a place for DOOH, don’t get me wrong. But if we start thinking it’s all DOOH, we are one step closer to WALL-E.
Welcome back, Dave! I agree with your reaction to ads on your refrigerator screen… MEH. If they paid me enough, I’d do it too.