I’m suffering a bit of blogger’s remorse about my comments yesterday re: the iPad marketing campaign.
I was initially reacting to a single ad I had seen (New York Times), and I probably shouldn’t have been so quick to react. One song in isolation is hardly enough evidence to judge an entire album.
Now that I’ve seen the ads going up around town, and I’ve revisited the TV commercial, I think that visions of iPad will indeed be dancing in more people’s heads. That, combined with the intense buzz that’s already out there, will drive more and more people to the Apple Store to see iPad for themselves. What Apple is doing is what it often does: they are visually making the product the absolute star of the ad, to make it as clear as possible how it works and what it will look like in your life.
The TV ad, although way too fast for many, adds an interesting effect when taken in context of all the print ads and posters. You can examine an individual screen in print, get a sense of the quantity of screens in the TV.
A wise man in advertising once taught me that if you’re going to reject someone’s work, it must be because it’s terrible — not because it isn’t what you would have done.
So I won’t quibble about certain elements of this campaign. I will only continue to wish there were more Apple cleverness in these ads. If ever there were a campaign that should make you smile, this is it — because that’s exactly what iPad makes you do.
