Apple building 1,000-person internal advertising agency

12 years ago

“TBWA/Media Arts Lab was presenting fresh work to its signature client when the Apple executive across the table stopped the proceedings and handed over another idea, saying simply, ‘We like this better,'” Ann-Christine Diaz and Maureen Morrison report for Advertising Age. “The favored ad was created by a rival agency: Apple’s in-house shop.”

“Recounted by a creative who has worked on the brand recently, it’s a scene that would have been unfathomable before the death of Apple’s creative heart and soul, Steve Jobs, roughly two-and-a-half years ago. But today Apple is thinking differently about its approach to advertising and marketing. Very differently,” Diaz and Morrison report. “Amid criticisms that it has failed to innovate, Apple is increasingly taking marketing into its own hands. It’s madly building an internal agency that it’s telling recruits will eventually number 1,000 — the size of Grey Advertising. It’s pitting TBWA/MAL against this internal agency with ‘jump balls’ to mine the best creative ideas, a controversial tactic with outside agencies, let alone an internal one. It’s going after some of adland’s boldest-faced names to staff its in-house shop — in some cases, it’s even poached executives from TBWA/MAL. And, in what once would have been seen as a sacrilegious breach of the Apple-MAL bond, it’s been inviting some of the ad industry’s top shops to pitch on major projects.”

“Once the ad industry’s maverick, the company has struggled to deliver a campaign that lives up to the “Think Different” legacy, marred by missteps like the Olympics 2012 ‘Genius Bar’ ads that quickly got pulled,” Diaz and Morrison report. “In May, Google kicked Apple out of the top spot in BrandZ’s annual ranking of Most Valuable Global brands, a position Apple held for three consecutive years. Apple clearly sees the urgency.”

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.

And as we followed up with in April of this year:

As Apple CEO, Steve Jobs focused on two things – product design and marketing. He was a genius at both. His talents cannot be replaced with one person. In fact, his talents in either discipline cannot be replaced by one person. Jony Ive and Phil Schiller without Jobs cannot be expected to perform as if Jobs was still working with them.

A team of people – talented people who actually get it and who are all on the same page – is an absolute necessity for Apple’s success, but it creates a problem: Jobs was a single filter. A unified mind. The founder. A group of people simply cannot replicate that. This is not to say that they cannot do great work (we believe Apple does, and will continue, to do great work) just that Apple is fundamentally affected by the loss of Steve Jobs and has to figure out a new way to work.