Man, what the heck happened to Apple’s ads?

Apple has long been known for its iconic ads. Their marketing has been gorgeous and the message aspirational: be better, think different.

Apple’s marketing machine has a high bar to hit and lately, some think it’s missed that mark. Apple’s latest series of ads are meant to show off the capabilities of Apple Intelligence. Some say the takeaway is that Apple consumers are kind of dumb.

“Because Apple did it, we’re all disappointed,” Michael Duda, managing partner at brand consultancy Bullish, told Sherwood News. “It’s like if we saw the pope drunk.”

Typically Apple ads have focused more on building the Apple brand — showing it to be sleek, smart, and out of the ordinary — than individual product features. They have high production values and good music. They cast Apple users as the characters we wish to be (are you a Mac or a PC?).

In the new Apple Intelligence ads, customers come off as simpletons and slackers: not being prepared for work, forgetting their spouse’s birthdays or people’s names, holding minor grievances and hoping to foist their work on someone else. In comes Apple Intelligence to save the day... with examples of technology its competitors (including Apple itself) already had.

In one ad, a man is wasting time at work — playing with his adjustable chair, making noises, pulling pieces of Scotch tape. He then writes an unbusinesslike email to his boss, trying to pawn off his work. He uses an AI writing tool to make the email sound professional, if a bit too formal and wordy (a lot like capabilities ChatGPT has had for a while). Lo and behold, his boss is impressed!

In another ad, a woman forgets her husband’s birthday and seemingly resents her daughters for having remembered. She seems annoyed and petty. She uses Apple Intelligence to create a musical slideshow of photos of her husband woodworking with the kids. (iPhone users might note that this is something iPhone has done automatically for years.) He’s touched!

Both ads end with the main characters looking self-satisfied as a song comes in with the words, “I am genius.” To me they’re kind of funny, but also cringe and not very impressive when it comes to the actual tech they’re demonstrating. They’re also definitely not what I expect from Apple.

These ads come after a widely-panned iPad ad that Apple ended up apologizing for this spring. In that one, an industrial press crushes the tools of humanity’s creative and cultural legacy — instruments, typewriters, paints, cameras, books. From that waste comes the “most powerful” and “thinnest” iPad ever. Artists and critics saw it as a tone-deaf representation of all the real-life things cultural, capital, and careers technology is destroying.

“They’re trying to extoll the product benefits,” Duda said. “It came across as you’re crushing my creative dreams.”

The company has obviously felt the need to switch things up, as iPhone sales, which make up about half the company’s revenue, have slowed in recent years.

But is it working?

A market-research firm called Grow Progress tested the two ads above with 2,400 Americans for Sherwood to see how it made them feel about Apple and its artificial intelligence. Using randomized controlled trials, Grow Progress found that people generally liked them.

The memory-movie ad gave viewers a more favorable view of Apple, especially among those who don’t own Apple products, the study found. The writing-tools one made people who already own Apple devices more likely to say Apple pushes technological boundaries.

The experts we spoke to said it’s not so much that these newer ads are bad, per se, but they are unexpected.

“You don’t typically see a big brand talk about features like a local furniture store talking about their couch on sale,” Greg Schwartz, founder of TV advertising agency Household, said. “It’s a little disorienting to see from Apple, in the same way it would be for Coke talking about bubbles in the bottle. They wouldn’t do that. They don’t need to.”

But perhaps, he said, Apple felt that the addition of generative AI — which Apple is hoping will spur iPhone sales among consumers holding onto their products longer — needs more explanation.

Apple didn’t respond to requests for comment on its branding strategy.

Schwartz said the ads did a good job of clearly communicating the benefits of Apple Intelligence. (He also pointed out that it got people — like me — talking, and there’s no such thing as bad publicity.) That could potentially be good for Apple’s top line.

“I do think it’s similarly effective and maybe more effective at selling products than the more eye-catching brand ads that we’re used to,” he said.

But others worry that such pedestrian ads could detract from the high-brow mystique the brand has built up over the years.

“In a vacuum, they’re good TV commercials,” Graham Douglas, cofounder and creative director at creative-strategy company Gus, said. “They’re fun, there’s craft, they’re memorable — creatively they’re fine.”

But, he said, you could slap a Microsoft, Google, or Samsung logo at the end of these Apple Intelligence ads and no one would be the wiser. In turn, that sort of sameness and incremental product comparison could detract from consumers’ willingness to pay a premium for what are essentially the same products as their competitors.

People pay for the Apple brand, not the features.

“It’s never been, ‘It’s going to send an email better than Blackberry,’” Douglas said. Historically, Apple’s ads have tried to “empower us to be more than we are: more creative, have more ingenuity, be different.”

What should Apple do?

“Find a way to present Apple Intelligence in way that feels like it’s not the basic use case of AI that every other tech company can implement, effectively promoting what Gmail has done for two years.”