Apple’s advertising dilemma aired at $2 billion trial

12 years ago

“As Apple Inc. was being targeted by an onslaught of negative advertising from arch-rival Samsung Electronics Co, the iPhone maker considered abandoning its longtime ad agency to fight back, according to evidence presented at a $2 billion patent trial,” Joel Rosenblatt and Adam Satariano report for Bloomberg.

“Apple executives last year weighed dropping the firm that has exclusively handled its advertising for 17 years to better respond to a blitz by Samsung criticizing the iPhone,” Rosenblatt and Satariano report. “The evidence introduced in federal court in San Jose, California, is part of Samsung’s attempt to demonstrate that its products and marketing, and not the alleged infringement of Apple’s patents, drove sales of Galaxy smartphones and caused iPhone sales to decline.”

MacDailyNews Take: iPhone sales haven’t declined.

“With Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of marketing, on the stand for a second day, the jury was shown an e-mail exchange he had with James Vincent of TBWA/Chiat/Day’s Media Arts Labs unit, the ad agency that Schiller said worked closely with Apple cofounder Steve Jobs since the 1990s,” Rosenblatt and Satariano report. “Samsung’s campaign, including some ads that ran before last year, mocked loyal iPhone users for waiting in line to buy new models and Apple for touting features that were already available in other smartphones like Samsung’s Galaxy. ‘We have a lot of work to do to turn this around,’ Schiller wrote to Vincent.”

Rosenblatt and Satariano report, “In a related exchange, Schiller wrote on Jan. 27, 2013, to Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook, who took over after Jobs died in October 2011: ‘We may need to find a search for a new agency. I’ve tried hard to keep this from being the situation but we are not getting what we need from them and haven’t been for a while.'”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote in March 2013:

Steve Jobs held a three-hour meeting every Wednesday afternoon with his top agency, marketing and communications people to approve each new commercial, print ad, web ad, and billboard. Does Tim Cook? If he does, does he have anything close to Jobs’ sensibilities in this area? Judging from Apple’s marketing since Steve left the building, he does not. Therefore, Cook needs to find a marketing guru to take Steve’s place, conduct these Wednesday meetings, and hold his marketing peoples’ feet to the fire until he/she is extremely satisfied.