What a difference a few decades make.
During the 1985 Super Bowl broadcast, Apple followed up its previous—and widely acclaimed—Super Bowl commercial, 1984, with a little disaster called Lemmings.
Designed to seduce business customers with “The Macintosh Office,” it actually insulted its intended target by depicting them as, uh … Lemmings.
34 years later, Apple is again making its pitch to business. This time, it’s a bit more down to earth—and infinitely more convincing.
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If there was a Beginner’s Guide To Corporate Screwups, surely it would explore the tried-and-true ways for companies to shoot themselves in the foot.
Release buggy software. Fail to protect customer data. Run a bad ad. See your CEO arrested. So many possibilities!
But AirPower is not your stereotypical screwup. It’s something far grander. Never in history has Apple announced a product, gone silent about it for 18 months, and then killed it before it ever shipped.
At least it proves that Apple can be a true innovator in the area of self-immolation.
“Freedom to fail” is actually a liberating thing, essential to the Apple culture. In an internal meeting, I once heard Steve Jobs defend Apple’s large cash reserve by saying, “It gives us the freedom to jump as high as we want. If we fail, we will always have solid ground beneath our feet.”
Unfortunately, AirPower isn’t the “liberating” kind of failure. It’s just shocking and sad.
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Zinger! Bang! Take that, Android!
Apple ran a witty (and wordy) billboard outside the CES Show in Vegas this week, and it became a news story in itself.
If you’re relatively new to Apple, this sudden burst of verbosity must have come as a shock. You might have thought that the non-headline “iPhone XR” was as clever as Apple gets in a billboard.
Is this a whole new Apple? Or just a temporary lapse of humdrum?
Actually, it’s an echo of an earlier Apple, when headlines would both amuse and inform.
Steve Jobs’ goal was never just to sell a product. It was to build a stronger brand, and headlines were a big part of that.Continue reading…
Steve Jobs once quoted Picasso: “Good artists borrow, great artists steal.”
True that. Innovative thinkers invent, observe and assimilate. They merge the old and new to create something fresh.
Apparently, the good and great artists were hard at work on Apple’s latest ad, Color Flood. I quite enjoyed it. But even as I watched it for the first time, I was visited by the Ghosts of Advertising Past.Continue reading…
Ben Franklin said that the only certainties in life are death and taxes. Until last week, I would have added “Jony Ive product videos” to that list.
Apple had a formula for these videos and it wasn’t about to budge—beauty shots and engineering animations, accompanied by Jony’s intelligently philosophical voice.
It’s gone on for so many years, I’ve actually lost count.
It’s not like the videos didn’t work. Apple sales certainly never suffered. It’s just felt odd that a company that puts creativity front and center would become so formulaic.
But all that changed last week when Apple unveiled two new videos—for MacBook Air and iPad Pro—and we didn’t hear a peep from Jony. I’m still recovering from the shock.
Thank the marketing gods for giving Apple a much-deserved kick in the butt. Continue reading…
My bubble has officially been burst.
Though I’ve had issues with iPhone naming for years, I’ve always assumed there was an underlying strategy, enigmatic as it might be.
Apparently I was giving Apple too much credit.
When Phil Schiller sat down with Engadget recently, he casually confessed that the S and the R have no real meaning. They’re just letters.
This news doesn’t exactly collapse the space-time continuum. However, it does rattle my personal belief system. Let me explain—Continue reading…
Every September, I eagerly await the unveiling of the new iPhones. I also feel a sense of dread, wondering what Apple is going to call them.
That’s because, when it comes to iPhone naming, Apple seems to wage a war against common sense.
Last year’s models set new standards for complexity. We had an 8, 8 Plus, X and SE. That’s two numbers, one Roman numeral, one paring of letters, plus an odd numerical gap between 8 and 10. Or, in Apple lingo, between 8 and X.
It’s hard to imagine how a family of only four products could end up with such needlessly complicated names—especially coming from the company that wrote the book on simplicity.
So how do the iPhone names look in 2018?Continue reading…
Okay, Farmers. You’ve enjoyed your monopoly on silly insurance ad jingles long enough. This is war!
Liberty Mutual has now marched into the arena, armed with a jingle even more annoying than yours. Surrender now, or you will see no mercy.
What Liberty Mutual did is actually pretty rare in this business. After running an ad campaign for at least a couple of years, they decided to “enhance” it with a new jingle at the end—a veritable body blow to competitors taken from the Classic Book of Advertising, circa 1964.
I’m painfully aware of how hard it is to come up with smart strategies and creative executions. I also know how many meetings it takes to sell a creative idea to people who may not see what you see.
That said, I can’t explain how ideas that deserve a quick and merciful death survive a process that includes multiple checkpoints at both the agency and client. The best I can do is imagine how the final meeting went…Continue reading…
The latest painful chapter in the JCPenney saga has now been written.
CEO Marvin Ellison resigned a couple of weeks back—with the company’s stock price down to a mere $2.43. That’s a particularly brutal number, considering that in 2007 a share of JCP went for $85.
Technically, this plummet was co-authored by three CEOs serving four terms—Marvin Ellison, Ron Johnson and two stints by Myron Ullman.
By numbers alone, it’s hard to tell who was worse. The stock plunged 65% under Ullman (Act I), 54% under Johnson, 58% under Ullman (Act II) and 66% under Ellison.
So I was surprised that Ellison received the praise of many writers reporting his resignation. “He helped turn around J.C. Penney,” said The Street. In what universe that happened may never be known.
Not only do the writers let Ellison off the hook, they seem to rally under a common theme: it’s all Ron Johnson’s fault. After all, Ron was in and out in less than two years, and the stock was decimated during his reign.
However, this narrative ignores two major facts. First, JCP had already lost more than half its value before Johnson took the reins. Second, Ullman and Ellison succeeded only in driving JCP further into the ground.
The truth is, Johnson’s vision was correct and necessary. History has now proven that JCP was (and is) doomed without a radical plan for reinvention.
The company committed the classic sin of throwing out the baby with the bathwater.Continue reading…
In the ad biz, we love to celebrate the best of the best.
What about the other ads? The not-so-fresh. The ones we see every day. Those that boldly go where everyone has been before. Don’t they deserve a little attention too?
Sadly, we can’t examine them all. So, in the interest of time, descend with me now into one small corner of this dark world: a place where animals do the selling.
Animal characters have existed since the dawn of advertising. At the risk of oversimplifying, these ads get produced because (a) the goal is winning people’s hearts, (b) people have a heart for animals, and (c) … logic!
In addition, animal characters come with excellent perks. They don’t need to be coddled on the set, they don’t squeeze you at contract time and they can’t be charged with unsavory crimes off-camera.
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Blue robotic eye, vertical, isolated