- Posts tagged Ads
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Good ad, bad ad
Even Steve Jobs is capable of having — as Pink Floyd once said — a momentary lapse of reason. I saw it with my own eyes at a meeting when Steve was trying to get the agency to squeeze a few more product benefits into an ad we were about to produce.
Sitting across the table from Steve was Lee Clow, past and current leader of Apple’s agency. Lee crumpled up 4-5 pieces of paper and tossed one to Steve. “This is a good ad,” said Lee, as Steve easily caught it.
Then, all at once, Lee tossed the remaining pile of crumpled balls of paper to Steve and he caught none of them. “That’s a bad ad,” said Lee.
Good post from Ken Segall, as always, but I especially love the above story.
Dear HP: I took the liberty of rewriting your new ad
(See the ad here.)
About The Verizon iPad Ad
Tonight Verizon began airing an ad for the iPad's availability on their network. It's unusual to see an ad ostensibly for an Apple product look so un-Apple like, but I think the ad was important for both Apple and Verizon.
Apple handles iPhone and iPad promotion for AT&T, so there are no AT&T ads for Apple products. This works out great for both parties. AT&T can spend ad dollars elsewhere and still get their logo at the end of Apple's ads, and Apple controls how their product is presented (face it, most device ads from carriers suck).
With Verizon and the iPad, it's different. This isn't a CDMA version that will run on Verizon's network. Instead, Verizon is selling the WiFi-only iPad paired with their MiFi portable hotspot. The MiFi turns Verizon's 3G signal into a WiFi signal the iPad can use.
In other words, using the "Verizon" iPad as a cellular device requires an extra piece of hardware from Verizon. I doubt Apple wanted anything to do with promoting that somewhat awkward solution, let alone someone else's hardware, so they let Verizon do their own ad. Verizon's fine with it because it gets people in their stores and sells hardware, and Apple's fine with it because it's more iPad exposure for the holiday season.
The iPad is actually shown very little in the ad. It assumes the iPad is so well-known that a glance or two and mention of the name are all the audience requires, then it shifts gears to focus on Verizon's network. In short, Apple is still carrying the ball on promoting the iPad, while Verizon gets the word out that you can buy one on their network.
Observatory on the different-thinking iCEO
What’s really important is what Steve had to say. His presentation is both a primer on the value of brand advertising and an insight into the soul of a company. If you dismiss it as yet another example of Steve Jobs programming his automatons, well — you just don’t get it. This thinking is what separates Apple from the hundreds of companies who simply churn out products.
The Think Different ads were about identifying who Apple's heroes were and defining the company based on that criterion. Steve Jobs felt you could judge a lot about an individual or company by who they most admired, and I still believe there's some truth to that.
But even beyond letting the public know, after a decade of raising prices and producing relatively generic Macs the Think Different campaign was about reminding Apple who they were. It worked.
Apple's New iPhone 4 Ads: A FaceTime Future?
Nevertheless, the ads are emotional proofs of concept for a future that will eventually be real for many millions, whether that future is brought about by the iPhone 4 or not.
You can see all four new ads on Apple's site. I think they're all well done, with my personal favorite being "Haircut".
But the ads mean less to me than Mashable's quote above. They seem to have forgotten Apple made FaceTime an open standard.
Unless Android handset makers are idiots, they should be fighting to be first to market with FaceTime on an Android phone. (Oh, and Microsoft should push for this in the first WP7 phone, too.) It's not about Apple, per se, but rather the technology they've made available to everyone.
If hardware makers don't blow it, this "concept for a future that will eventually be real for many millions" will be brought about through Apple's work, not through their phone. For FaceTime, think of iPhone 4 as Apple's model to show other hardware makers how it's done.
Silly Apple Criticism 2: Apple Has iAds, So Safari's Reader Function is Hypocritical Ad Blocking
Critique: It's hypocrtical of Apple to introduce their own ads while putting an ad blocker in Safari 5.
Safari Reader is not an ad blocker. To call it that is to misunderstand "reader" formatters, or ad blockers, or both.
An ad blocker blocks ads. Not trying to be facetious, but that's what it does. It blocks ads. They're blocked. You go to a web page, and you do not see ads. Ads are prevented (you might say, "blocked") from displaying. When you browse with an ad blocker, you go from page to page sans ads. Are we clear?
A reader formatter doesn't do that. You don't browse with these. When you go to a page you see the same ads as everyone else. The ad impression is counted (for the content provider) and you're free to click on any ad to view at will.
What a reader does do is determine if there's an article on the page, and give you the option to display it more cleanly for easier reading. Yes, the ads (along with other formatiing) do not appear in the reading pane, but they're still in the background with the rest of the web page, and when you exit the reader in any way—which you have to do to get anywhere else—they're displayed again.
That's a big difference. In fact, a reader cannot block ads; the page must load before it can even be invoked in the first place. No one accuses Readability, for example, of being an ad blocker. In fact, someone looking for an ad blocker would be extremely disappointed in the results if they tried to use one of these readers for that purpose.
Apple's ad terms
Consider the flipside perspective, too. What if it were Apple honing in on Google’s lucrative search advertising business, building up profiles on Web searchers via Safari and displaying targeted ads within the browser during Google searches? Or selling the search behavior of Safari users to Microsoft so that it could improve Bing at Google's expense? I can hardly imagine Google would be happy about Apple using Google search data to threaten its bread-and-butter business. In fact, whatever deal Google and Apple have struck for Safari’s search bar probably already prohibits that kind of behavior. Does that sound anticompetitive to you? Or is it just the sign of a company protecting its crown jewels from a fierce competitor?
The big difference is that, if Apple did attempt to "hone in" on Google search, and Google took steps to prevent it, Apple, not Google, would be derided as the aggressor. Such is the tech tide flowing against Apple.
Apple's secrecy pisses tech pundits off. Push comes to shove, the majority of them will support the company with free-flowing PR every time. Any communication, whether vapor, marketing speak or statistical manipulation is better to them than a "no comment", and typically reported with little question. It's why they proclaimed Microsoft King the better part of 20 years.
About Google "Openness"
Google's main product, its search engine, is still a very, very closed platform. If a developer wants to innovate off of Google's search, they currently have two options the AJAX search API and Google's Custom Search Engine (CSE) -- both of which have tremendous limitations. The AJAX API limits results to just 8, and really just keeps trying to drive users back to Google's properties. For CSE, the terms are quite limiting and only let you display Google ads on the results page
I've been saying for a while that Google is no more open when it comes to its key products than Apple is. When Apple's competitors beat the " open" drum, it's BS. Most of the tech press don't care—they just want a story to write—but it's nice to see some people have no problem stating it clearly.
