creative | Ken Segall

A sign of life in Apple billboards

01/11/19

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…

Apple’s “Color Flood”: like Picasso said

12/31/18

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…

Apple’s disturbing confession

10/29/18

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…

iPhone naming: 1 step forward, 4 steps back

09/26/18

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…

Battle of the insurance jingles

08/10/18

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…

Animal instinct: the low end of advertising

05/28/18

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.
Continue reading…