“Chances are you can vaguely remember the last Apple ad you saw, but do you remember it in the same way you remember the company’s ‘1984’ commercial for the original Macintosh, or its wonderful ‘Think Different’ campaign?” Killian Bell writes for Cult of Mac. “It’s been a while since we saw anything quite as iconic.”
“Apple still creates great commercials we can’t help but talk about, but many fans would say those ads aren’t as good as they once were,” Bell writes.
Has Apple lost its marketing magic, or is it just too difficult to create truly iconic ads in the digital age?”
Luke Dormehl responds, “No company is going to hit it out of the ballpark every time, but it’s the swinging for the fences that counts. It just feels like Apple is content to play it safe lately. And that’s a shame.”
Much more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: The answer to the headline is: Steve Jobs died.
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 2014:
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. [Hence Apple’s subsequent Marc Newson hire to be Jony Ive’s muse/sounding board. – MDN Editor, Nov. 7, 2014]
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.