You are SPOT – ON.

THANKS!

There is no accounting for other people’s poor taste and lack of heart!

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

It runs the ads because they are effective in attracting buyers. Econ 001.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Priceless!

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.

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.

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.

that said, it hasn’t touched my life that much, but the ad totally convinced me it would.