“Madison Avenue is betting that Apple’s advertising business is headed for a shake-up — and knows just the man to do it,” Claire Atkinson reports for The New York Post.
“Ad executives salivating over the juicy prospect point to signs that the tech giant is tiring of longtime creative agency TBWA Media Labs after 30 years and is ready to put its entire account up for grabs,” Atkinson reports. “What’s more, the industry is buzzing that Apple will look to music maestro Jimmy Iovine, the boss of newly acquired Beats headphones and its sister music-streaming service, to help it regain its marketing mojo.”
“‘Apple bought Beats for a lot of reasons,’ said one new business executive at a top agency. ‘They think they’re marketing geniuses. It is safe to assume Beats would be part of an assessment of all [Apple] partners,'” Atkinson reports. “Apple CEO Tim Cook is clearly looking to kick off a new luxury era in Apple’s approach to advertising under marketing boss Phil Schiller. Apparently, Schiller, who has been fending off criticism from even Apple board members, came close to firing TWBA over lame ads. An e-mail from early 2013 that came to light this spring as part of a Samsung lawsuit included this embarrassing note to the agency: ‘I now have Apple board members asking ‘what is going on with advertising and what are you going to do to fix it?’’ wrote Schiller.”
Read more in the full article here.
Recent Apple ads have gotten schmaltzy, sentimental and pretentious. The height of Apple advertising in the 21st century was the iPod silhouette campaign and the I’m a Mac/I’m a PC campaign. Precisely what made those ads great was the lack of pretension and appeals to schmaltzy sentimentality. I want to see Apple advertising return to being fun, funny and cool.
Yeah, Apple ads now are always trying to tug on my heart strings. Please Apple, no more sentimental lullaby music and families hugging…it’s just weak sauce.
Agree 100% – No Pretension, humorous with relevant information. All in all, very good ads.
Amazingly, Amazon ads have become more Apple’s old ads. Unfortunately, Apple has become more like Microsoft ads.
A sad reflection but you are right. The one good thing about this mind is by comparison just how even more impressive a great new campaign would look after having to suffer those sick making attempts of late.
Easy. There is no Steve Jobs adult advert supervision available anymore. Apple just needs to deal with this differently now and be proactive which looks as though they are. No reason why Apple can’t continue to have the greatest ads of all.
Chiat had it’s day
+1 for pun. -10,000 for the grammatical error and lack of punctuation.
Can you read between the lines?
III
Its.
Who is better at marketing, Apple which has grown to be the largest company in the world or Beats, a headphone company which targets its products to urban gangsta youth mores?
Beats, obviously.
How else can you explain them selling acoustically inferior headphones at such a high price? They are marketing geniuses, let me tell you.
Old man yells at cloud?
I can assure you, I see Beats headphones all over at the gym, and few if any of the people wearing them are in a gang.
True but we all know how those boring, fixated, middle class types all love to have a bit of street in them as they head back to their black BMWs.
A news article today posits that the global economy is more fragile than before the 2007 downturn. The timing for a luxury product strategy seems problematic at best.
Really? A news article? Wow, they hardly ever say bullshit things on news articles. Thanks for the info, I am stuffing my money in my mattress. Glad you posted JD, you have saved our bacon.
that’s what they said in the 2007-2008 real estate crash recession…
I read endless articles stating how apple would suffer the most as in a recession and with belt tightening high end products would suffer etc. The cheapo PC guys selling netbooks would make out the best…
Didn’t happen.
Computerworld 2009
“Although the recession is deepening and sales of rivals are softening, Apple Inc. today announced it had set a single-quarter revenue record in the last three months of 2008, selling more than 2.5 million Macs and 4.3 million iPhones…. ”
Apple sailed through the recession with record revenues. Before 2007 aapl stock around 70 -100 (before split price) , today it’s close to 700 (using same measurement) . One analyst said if you were an Apple investor and fell asleep in 2007 and woke up 5 years later, looked at your portfolio you wouldn’t have realized there was recession but thought it was a boom…
I assume you didn’t notice how Apple weathered the last one rather well while nearly all those companies focusing on cheap and cheerful fell by the wayside desperate for a survival plan. Luxury brands done right are always the best place to be even in downturns just ask Ahrendts and Burberry.