Apple’s homegrown commercials underperforming those made by its longtime agency

12 years ago

“Apple began building its own team of ad men and women last year, amid frustration with TBWA\Media Arts Labs, a unit of TBWA\Chiat\Day, the agency that was responsible for the 1984 and Think Different commercials,” Peter Burrows reports for Bloomberg. “So far, ads made by the in-house team have received a cooler reception from viewers on average than those made by the agency. Ace Metrix gathers data from hundreds of TV watchers to discern how persuasive and entertaining an ad is.”

“There’s a reason big corporations hire advertising agencies, rather than try to put together a bench of their own Don Drapers,” Burrows reports. “Going outside ensures that companies don’t get too caught up in their own views of themselves, says Rob Siltanen, an advertising consultant who wrote the ‘Here’s to the crazy ones’ copy for Apple’s iconic 1997 campaign after Steve Jobs returned to the company.”

“South Korea’s Samsung Electronics has been happy to let 72andsunny, a Los Angeles advertising firm, handle its creative. The partnership is paying off. A recent ad for the Galaxy S5, which shows the water-proof device being used to film kids in a sprinkler, scored a 739. That’s the second Galaxy ad to top 700. The best score any Apple ad has ever gotten was 696 for a 2010 commercial for its FaceTime videoconferencing service,” Burrows reports. “The highest-scoring ad from the Apple team is its most recent. The spot highlights how iPhone owners can use the device to exercise, set to the strains of an old-timey song called “Chicken Fat.” It earned a score of 611 from Ace Metrix.”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote well over a year ago 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.