Apple last night debuted a new television advertisement on U.S. and Canadian broadcast and cable networks.
The spot features a girl and her grandfather sharing a moment of holiday cheer as the girl sings “I’ll be Home for Christmas” over FaceTime between his iPad (4th gen.) and her iPad mini.
The simple ad really allows for those who are unfamiliar with FaceTime to see how it works and gives an example — perfectly in tune with the season — of how they might use FaceTime in their lives.
Apple’s “I’ll Be Home” TV ad, featuring iPad, iPad mini, and FaceTime:
Direct link to video here.
MacDailyNews Take: This is one of Apple’s better ads – ever. Not only does it fit perfectly with the season and effortlessly show off the products and technology in a real, believable way, the clean, simple audio track compels everyone in the room to stop and look to see what’s going on.
yawn, where’s the spark?
Right here.
😀
You made my day. Thx. 🙂
Zing!!
Perspective never really looks like that. If gramps looks at the girl he looks off camera. He’d only look like that if he stared at the camera lens Missing the girls action. At this point apple needs to drive home why their products are the best. It should be the best vs the rest. People don’t know that. The masses don’t, the PC users don’t. that’s why the world is ten to one Pc. Can we get a bigger iPhone screen. How about stereo speakers on the iPad. What would that cost. Five cents? I use a headset with my iPad like. Never. Can I get a movie on the iPad without connecting to NASA as well? Don’t try watching this with airtime on your big screen unless you have 45 minutes for the transfer. These ads cone off pretentious and young kids feel that way. Where’s home by the way. Guam? Merry Xmas hahaaha.
Way too long. it seems to go on forever. A bit torturous. I can’t imagine too many people watching this all the way through at home.
Grich
Grich? Grinch, right?
Humbug
The song she sung has four sentences… Just like your post, which I guess means it was too long, seems to go on forever, a bit torturous and not too many people reading this all the way throu…. 😉
The ADHD generation has spoken!
🙂
30 seconds! Great attention span. Bet you wife/girlfriend has a long face.
He’s doing a horse?
agree. the other responses to your post are missing the point – it’s absolute versus subjective time. there are no cuts (like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yatSAEqNL7k) and the two performers just aren’t charismatic enough for 30s of uninterrupted…face time.
That facetime commercial for the iphone is classic. This spot with the little girl for me actually spotlights a major drawback to facetime, you can’t just put the ipad down and pretend you listened and say “that was very nice honey!”
yeah, it’s one of the emotionally touching ads i’ve ever seen. what kills me is the deaf couple at the end – i mean, it never crossed my mind that a revolutionary feature of a video phone would be moving beyond TTY for the deaf. it’s no surprise they save it for the end. the ad says, we’re creating the future and it matters because its going to touch your life in a million different ways.
that said, it hasn’t touched my life that much, but the ad totally convinced me it would.
TTY ?
TTY/TTD are a class of hardware that couple to a phone line (traditionally by putting a wired landline phone into a cradle) to enable both parties to type text to one another. It’s basically hardware-based text chat over a plain old telephone line, although it can only go in one direction at once. It’s being supplanted by newer technologies, like SMS and e-mail – but those things don’t completely fill the gap of not being able to sign to communication, which FaceTime allows. That’s why Apple hired Matt Damon to play the deaf guy in the original FaceTime ad. (kidding)
Did not know that. Thank you for clarifying. Seems like sms would obviate this, but apparently this is still in use?
Yeah, I think SMS and e-mail are making TTY a “legacy” solution, although I suspect older folks and people without internet access are still using it. Also, if you’re deaf, you probably need a landline and TTY to get 911. It would make sense for the iPhone to support TTY (to connect to legacy services) – it certainly has everything needed to do so, I should think.
I think FaceTime is super-important, compared to text-based services, because the Deaf are capable of great expressiveness with signing (not just with their hands, but also their face and whole body language): FaceTime is high bandwidth communication for the Deaf.
There’s a service called ZVRS, which is available on the iPhone that provides read-time sign language to spoken language translation (using an interpreter).
Way better than that damn Dragon infomercial!
30 seconds?
most ads start long and then get trimmed down.
Mentally people who have already seen the ad are re creating it in their brains so companies can trim them down.
(this saves money but has the virtually the same impact).
That’s how most ad campaigns work but i’m not sure how apple does it.
(ex-advertising exec).
RP : obviously you’re not a grandparent. Nor parent. So since you’re opinion represents an awful lot of posters on this site, crawl back in the basement and read your comic books. Mom will call you for supper. And try getting out after Christmas and finding a job. 22 is way too old to be living at home. Prick.
Its a great ad. Plus she is the mini. Its really one of the best apple ads ever.
I kept waiting for grandpa to join in.
Wait, where were Grandpa’s hands…?
(Sorry, now back to Chritmas)
😀
TT that is beneath you.
haha! you really think so?
Blue Jay, you are so right!!
There is no accounting for other people’s poor taste and lack of heart!
I think the (understated) spark is in the grandpa’s eyes. When I started teaching basic computer classes to adults a few years back, we often had grandparents show up who bought a computer just to stay connected to their grandchildren. This ad captures that sentiment simply and says Merry Christmas in a short time
“I’ll be home for Christmas to pick up my new iMac, gramps, so have it ready!”
My only complaint is that there is no reference to FaceTime. I know it’s face time. You know it’s face time. But what about all the millions of people out there that have never heard the term “FaceTime”? I doubt that these people know just what they are seeing in that commercial.
What it it *does* accomplish is encourage those familiar with FT to make the effort to set it up with friends and family, and get some use out of it.
Grandpa does not need to know the name FaceTime in order to purchase an iPad. Curiosity will get him to an Apple store for a demo.
Let’s face it, if she wasn’t away from home, she’d be singing a different song.
Of course the iPads are video phones. Those who don’t see that, in this commercial, are too stupid to choose Apple products in the first place.
Not just Apple but the ukulele is on the rebound. Anyone with an iPad who wants to learn what the ukulele is all about — its lore, history, players and a complete, interactive range of lessons for absolute beginners and longtime players should check out the tate of the art of ukulele education created on iBooks Author. See “Cool Hand Uke’s Way to Love Uke” on iBookstore, via iTunes.
gooey.
Such a hard ad to figure out. No feature list. The actors aren’t particularly glamorous. And SPECs? Where are the SPECs?!?
My thoughts exactly – of what a Samsung and other “PC Techies” would think!
No Futuristic Robot-People exploding through space station walls?
Did I miss something?
Pfff. Just a grandparent’s love. Like that would ever sell anything.
/S
yes, where are all the psychotic people pawing the air, manipulating their imaginary heads-up displays?! Where’s all the laser beams and transforming machinery?
GrAnpa sees his grandchild…… Sold…. I had a similar experience when a client rented on of my vacation rentals on Cancun…. Clients daughter connected to our WiFi, went to a balcony that faced the beach and Facetimed her grandfather and showed him her with beach behind her…. A child and a grandfather video chatting… Steve’s vision fulfilled…”for the rest of us”…. This is what will sell Apple products.. Not specs , not maps , not who is fastest or price….it’s futuristic capabilities available now and accessablw to everyone .and you don’t need to be a tech geek to do it. Believe me the people who that ad is aimed, get it.
Which is why Apple runs those ads. Not for the geeks, nor the tech elite, nor the media, nor corporate CFOs, nor the media critics, nor the market analysts, nor to win favor with influential bloggers, nor to influence investors, or to appease God.
It runs the ads because they are effective in attracting buyers. Econ 001.
Geico could learn a valuable lesson from this.
Brilliant. This will sell more iPads.
Seems pretty late to debut a Christmas ad. Most spending on gifts is over. Apple must hope it also influences sales beyond Christmas.
Tell that to my wife!
that is the most vapid and saccharine apple ad i have ever seen!
…and a total rip-off of zooey deschanel’s homemade video:
they should have just had zooey do it, or find out if ellen feis can sing. anybody defending this utterly spiritless ad should look at the think different and switch campaigns – no comparison.
Apple consistently uses its advertising to show its devices as the hero. In this ad the iPad and FaceTime are the hero for making it Grandpa-easy to have a moment in the life of his granddaughter.
“Think Different” was a brand transition campaign and isn’t related to this sort of advertisement in any way.
The switch campaign was just that: awareness that the morass of computerdom you’re used to (Windows) isn’t the only game in town. So also not related to this type of advertising in any way.
I don’t dispute the specific points you’re making, Jim, but my interpretation is going from a different angle: regardless of the “strategy” of the ad, which is what you’re talking about, there is an emotional impact and cultural juice that an ad does or doesn’t have. ad’s either have pizzaz or not, regardless of marketing strategy.
Opinion vs opinion. No losers.
Wow, it’s so clear! Singing, two people, it’s like they just copied the video. Now that I think of it, all of their commercials are a copy of this one. Music, two people. Oh Apple please be original. No more people and no more music in the commercials.
really? let’s see…ukulele, holiday ballad, webcam, young girl singing. how do you get from that to “all commercials” are like that?
i love apple – i love apple marketing – and i hold apple to a higher standard because, in fact, they are pretty much the only company that makes great ads (racking my brain for any that even compare).
Not even close to the same song, two adults singing together. If you want to claim the ukulele as similar, then I’ll give you a point. However, posting a video is not the same as FaceTime with your grandfather. One last point. YouTube has 77 videos of people playing a ukulele and singing. So perhaps Zooey didn’t invent the ukulele sing-a -long.
Okay, if you don’t see the similarity, I can never convince of it on the basis of just facts – for me it’s the sum of the parts. I think the ad aspires to have the charm of the Zooey video but falls flat because the performers just don’t have any charisma, most importantly the girl (gramps doesn’t know what to do with himself). She’s ain’t no Zooey. Consider the intense charm of the original MacBook Air commercial with Yael Naim’s vocals – totally engaging.
Dumbweasel has a crush on anorexic Emo girl.
emo, definately. crush, pretty much – it’s the eyes that make me weak-kneed. but anorexic? where do you get that? her weight is normal for a real-world woman, and a bit chubby for hollywood.
CHUBBY? 5 feet 6 inches /128 lbs. I beg your pardon.
sorry – i made my point poorly. by “for hollywood” i meant only in the totally warped body image values of hollywood. i think she is healthy-looking and attractive.
Sure beats fscking dancing “clickers”!
So any video of a female singing and playing the ukulele is a “total rip-off”? Give me a break!!!
nope, only ones with a ukulele, a young girl singing a charming holiday ballad over a webcam. i would be very surprised if their marketing team did not become inspired by deschanel’s video. i guess what annoys me more than that they used it as the basis for their video, is that the result was a neutered version.
Pretty weak sauce.. Females have been playing guitars for a long time, and I doubt Zooey was the first to learn to play the ukulele. They are also pretty well made to play holiday music, so even if there was inspiration here, you can hardly claim this was a direct rip off.
Wait.. what.. Zooey DesChanel invented home made videos, or playing with a hand held string instrument? What again?
That’s what we do with my parents. Chat on Facetime.
We used to do Skype but my parents PC was so buggy half the time it wouldn’t work. So I sent them an iPad, Airport Express and cables. Everything was setup so all they had to do was plug it into the cable modem.
The iPad and facetime work very well and it is easy to connect and chat.
Now I’m going to have to get my 17 year old daughter to sing to them. That would be funny.
Sweet, touching, tasteful, poignant, classic Apple!
Girl can’t sing for beans.
Gramps thinks he’s a clam.
On the contrary, the girl’s pitch is dead-on. Gramps, like us, is getting a bit impatient- they should have synced to another duo, say a soldier and his girl… the commercial as is perpetuates the Samsung depiction of Apple as your parents’ (or grandparents’) technology. Apple should be hip, not sickeningly sweet.
umm, no. Ironic that people used to label Justin Long in the “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” ads as being a hipster. Now every Samsung and Android ad features hipster douchebag narcissists, prancing around in their hipster costumes, every dude wearing a stupid hipster hat.
Guess what- it’s the grownups who actually open their purse strings and buy stuff – the ones who don’t pirate everything they can- who care about things like grand kids and grand dads. And quality.
The grownups have made Apple what it is today. The narcissist hipsters are worthless as consumers- they have no brand loyalty and less attention span. They’re too busy prancing.
Me-o My-o indeed.
Yes, Apple should aim its advertising at the only demographic that matters, the 20-something Peter Pan generation sleeping on mom & dad’s couch while looking for their next barista job. No wonder they ridicule their parents. If they took their parents seriously they’d be embarrassed to be 28 and still sponging. They by Android because they are cheap and so is Android. The biggest difference between the hipsters in the Android commercial and the parents having a place saved in line is the parents have a few hundred dollars to spend on Apple products. The hipsters only get $30 a week for an allowance.
Your line of reasoning seems to be that for the 50-80-something demographic, it doesn’t matter if ads have any sort of cultural edge, emotional impact or charisma doesn’t matter – the old folks will scoop up saccharin crud and like it.
The people I know in that age group (and I’m 3 years away from it) are, in fact, pretty damn hip and appreciate an impactful ad. The gramps in the video is utterly passive and flat – not the way I would want to be represented if I were 80.
I’m 65 and well past video games, tinkering with my OS, and bragging about specs. Yes, what I DO care about is my human relationships. Grandpa is enjoying his granddaughter’s performance, something he might well be unable to enjoy in person. I realize that it’s important to discount and denigrate anything not high tech and whiz-bang these days, but frankly, most people with money to spend don’t give a rat’s ass.
I agree with most of your points, except one: the apparent conclusion that because the demographic you reference doesn’t care about specs and does care about human relationships that they’ll respond emotionally to any old gooey schlock that’s dished up to them.
Ultimately, the ad falls flat, in my opinion, not because of the basic concept involved – people making an emotional connection over distance thanks to FaceTime – Apple has made effective ads with exactly that design. It falls flat because it is a poorly designed and executed ad. See the original FaceTime ad for an example of how it’s done right.
I disagree, but you are welcome to your view. Ultimately Apple will sell boatloads whether this ad was the reason or not.
You are wrong. Grandpa is not passive—he’s rapt—engrossed—enjoying the miracle of the moment.
I don’t disagree that the actor is trying to act “rapt”, but that’s a hard thing to pull off for 30 seconds…he is silent, virtually unmoving and has little emotive expression in his face. Not sure any actor could pull it off – I don’t think this one comes close – but ultimately it’s a poorly designed ad that makes it fail emotionally for me.
Can you imagine the ad re-done as a duet, because gramps is able to sing and play an instrument? A duet over distance? That is an ad that might move me.
But we all know old people can’t sing or play instruments.
Sorry—I believe you’re over thinking it. There are TWO faces visible. One is active, the other passive.
What do you think happens when both are active? Countless experiments have shown that a person’s attention switches repeatedly between multiple stimuli. In this ad, the grandparent’s smiling face, unchanging, gets mentally filed, and attention is focused on the message being actively delivered by the girl. Thus the message itself—”I’m thinking of you”—comes through undiluted and is in fact reinforced by the secondary recollection of the special audience of one, discreetly observed with empathy, by you.
Well, maybe not by you, but by me and I hope anyone else.
I didn’t respond to the ad at a emotional gut level in the way I usually do with Apple ads – I’m just trying to unpack the reason why.
Compare it with the first ad for FaceTime – it still gives me goose pimples every time I watch it. It has a lot of heart, and it gets the technology/product message not in spite of that, but through it. It could have been sappy, but it isn’t – whereas the new ad is mawkish.
Do you not see a difference in emotional impact and dynamism between the two ads?
I do see your point. I simply believe that Apple averaged us using market research based on the latest findings in cognitive science to design the ads. We are being manipulated not just on a generalized, pointed emotional level, but on a level normalized by the latest model of the target audience based on analytics tempered by cutting-edge cognitive research. The bottom line is what matters. If Apple’s calculations are correct, they’ll make a lot of money. If yours are more pertinent, they’ll make less.
I bet you’re absolutely right in your analysis, and if so, it’s exactly what I’m concerned about: that the cognitive scientists are in charge and we no longer have Steve acting as the gatekeeper for the vitality of the brand. Apple’s ads have been art and art is not made by averaging the audience. if Apple has gone down the path of “average” for their marketing, they are no longer thinking different.
Right on the money. The quantum Steve Jobs Variable is no longer part of the equation. We have to hope for parity, or better, with the marketing mojo of the competition. They have access to science too.
Perhaps you didn’t respond because you don’t have grandkids?
I’m not a grandparent, but like I said, I love the first FaceTime ad and find all the vignettes very touching (regardless of whether they represent ME) including the one with the old couple – an old couple who are totally animated. I’m not deaf either, but find the last scene, with the deaf couple signing…one of the best clinchers I’ve ever seen in an TV spot.
The “deaf” spot drew my tears. It is transcendent.
This spot had several hooks that worked for me personally: the girl, the ukulele, and the forlorn song—I can still access the emotion I felt long ago, listening to Elvis Presley sing it while I missed my Daddy at Christmas, far off in a war.
Emotion.
There are ways to do it right:
Well said. Android is for settlers, and people without taste.
Exactly. “The rest of us” are not hipsters. They are ordinary people with normal emotions. As pointed out by Dance Dance, this hipster-Apple connection was made up by the ignoble opposition, in attempts to psychologically manipulate consumers who supposedly would recoil from being identified as pretentious, indolent slugs, but ordinary people don’t fall for such mumbo-jumbo.
Apple should not be hip. The market slice consisting of the hip, the pseudo-hip, the wannabes, and all others whose drama-queen side overpowers their common sense—that’s a tiny market compared to vast humanity who don’t squander their precious time with petty canards against the establishment. And today, Apple is clearly the establishment.
+1000….again.
“…all others whose drama-queen side overpowers their common sense…”
Priceless!
It’s a GREAT Ad.
Charming.
Very talented girl – both singing and playing smooth, confident and genuine.
Grandfather smiling and listening just right.
The brilliance is in the cleanness and the simplicity.
Wow Tech knows not.
The comments on this article are shocking. What a bunch of dull-witted stick-in-the-muds!!!
“MERRY CHRISTMAS!” (whether you like it or not)
Or is it sticks-in-the-mud?
Sorry, just filling in for the grammar police who are AWOL tonight.
No need to fill in for the pitiless self-appointed media critics, for they are legion.
Yes…. MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!!
Her hands are ginormous!
hilarious – didn’t notice that.
Great commercial but she is not the one playing the ukulele. Watch the ad closely and look at her left shoulder…this is another video hoax…her hands are huge because the superimposed her over the person who actually played…still a good ad
A couple of weeks ago I attended the Rolling Stones concert in London. I facetimed my daughter and switched to the rear camera so she could see what we were seeing. She loved it. FaceTime is great for this kind of ‘broadcasting’.
Apple Perfect!
Nothing more needs to be said.
One more thing needs to be said…
MDN accumulates more posts than usual for stories about ads. Ad aficionados, anti-ad activists, and everyone in between all respond in some way. It’s all very good for business.
Underneath it all is the emotional ball of nerves that makes commerce, and even society, possible in the first place. The feelings that animate all our choices uniquely define each of us.
Anything that presents the world with the most succinct, universal and deeply felt personal message is sure to have great success.
In the end, retail sales figures are less about the impersonal game of business than a marker in time about our values as a people.
…and Apple illustrates all that, indelibly.
Right you are, Other Steve!
It was a great ad. Brought a mist to my eyes.
Obliviously many of you complainers are not grandparents who will not be spending the holidays with your grandchildren. We use Facetime all the time to keep up with our grandkids.
People who watch know it is an iPad, all they need to do is go to an Apple store or Best Buy and mention the commercial. The sales staff can tell them what it is about. Even in the 2 Best Buys in my area, the Apple sales staff are quite competent.
I believe it is a great commercial. But if you would rather watch robots busting through walls or dancing fools doing click, click, click….then have at it.
THANK,YOU TOM!!!
You are SPOT – ON.
THANKS!