Nobody Wanted This: Samsung Fridges Are Getting Ads

If your home is your temple—the last place where you can escape the blasted outside landscape of billboards, screen ads, bus ads, train ads, and TV ads—know that the Mongol horde of advertising is looking to break down your fortress walls. Samsung’s new agenda for its smart home includes sticking ads into its ultra-expensive refrigerators with screens. Don’t worry, you can dismiss some of those ads, but the only way to get rid of them completely is to disconnect your fridge from the internet.

Android Authority^[1] first spotted changes in the latest firmware update that is pushing ads to some users as part of a “pilot program.” Samsung told the site that ads would appear on “certain Family Hub refrigerator cover screens” when the fridge is idle. Users will be able to dismiss the ads, and they won’t appear again while the ad campaign is ongoing.

Ads won’t appear when users have the screens set to show the weather or photo albums. These Family Hub refrigerators with screens start at $1,800 (on sale versus $2,332 MSRP) and only get more expensive from there. Earlier this year, Samsung showed me several of its major appliances^[2] it was pushing for 2025, including a four-door model with a much smaller 9-inch screen that sports “AI Home” rather than the full Family Hub suite. There’s no reason why Samsung couldn’t update its appliances with screens to display ads, from its latest $1,100 Bespoke AI Jet Ultra vacuum to its $2,300 Bespoke AI Oven.

I reached out to Samsung to learn if the company had any plans for ads on more appliances, and we will update this story if we hear more. The possibility of OTA updates showing ads has kept me from embracing any kind of screen-based smart home technology. If I can’t stand the endless parade of low-quality ads on YouTube, how could I stand to be at home if my oven shows me commercials for hair loss supplements? I enjoy cooking whenever I have a spare moment, and I use that time to break away from the ever-present glow of screens.

The future of smart home is all about ads

As smart home appliances grow more sophisticated, they will inevitably start to push you into buying things. Initial demos of Amazon’s updated Alexa+^[3]—a beefed-up smart home AI—showed how the more intelligent assistant could fill a shopping cart for you just by describing what you wanted to cook. Which ingredients get top billing? While Amazon has not revealed its formula for which groceries go in your cart, you only have to look at the current state of Amazon.com to know it will likely be whichever company is willing to pay for a “sponsored” position.

I can’t help but imagine how ads will be inextricably linked to the future of smart homes. Google is currently working with TCL to stick its Gemini AI^[4] directly inside TVs, letting users ask questions of their screen beyond what to watch next. Samsung is working on similar home-based AI^[5] that it showed off at IFA 2025^[6]. The Korean tech giant’s Vision AI Companion provides “personalized recommendations” for TVs, but the end goal is to stick AI-enabled smart home speakers everywhere in the home. The AI will talk to you and set up calendar events on your behalf. It doesn’t seem too far a stretch to see how it might try to advertise to you as well.

You can witness this best with fellow appliance maker LG. At IFA, I stuck around for an extremely long demo that could only be described as a demented Leave It to Beaver fever dream about the benefits of living in a fully interconnected home. Before you ask, yes, LG had an actor stick several plastic vegetables into a fake fridge. The number of screens LG would stick in your kitchen is already gauche, but add in AI, which will decide what meals you should cook and what ingredients you need to buy. With new smart home tech, there are even more opportunities for companies to stick ads in your face, even if we don’t know they are ads.