For those
interested in the ad agency space (aka Mad Men): Apple Is Pulling Away From the
Agency That Created Its Most Iconic Ads.
In the early
'80s, Steve Jobs and Lee Clow formed one of the most enduring client-agency
relationships in the advertising world. TBWA/Chiat/Day, created the company’s
most iconic ads, including the "1984" Super Bowl ad and the "Mac
vs. PC" campaign in the 2000s. Apple is
constantly changing, and so are its ad campaigns. When John Lennon and Yoko Ono promoted Apple
Computers on a billboard in August 1998 in Los Angeles, no one would imagine
that this relationship would end in 2014.According to a
report in AdAge , Apple is in
the process of building an internal ad agency of 1,000 employees. TBWA, which
had only one client since the mid 2000s,Apple, is now competing with Apple’s own advertising agency.
Apart from fashion brands, most major companies rely on outside agencies, thus Apple’s attempt to create an in-house ad agency is quite unusual. But Apple is a unique case on its own. The in-house ad agency plan coincides with a new phase for the company. After Steve Job’s absence, there has been a lot of traffic in Apple’s news. With a pending $3 billion purchase of Beats in the works, a smart watch launch likely this fall and a new focus on healthcare, the company appears to have entered a new era. We have to admit that it went through an inertia phase the past years; you can recall the Genius Bar Ads in 2012 that featured supposed Apple Store employees solving people's problems on the fly; when fans complained, they pulled the ads. These, and other lawsuit incidents with Samsung made Apple’s ad presence weak, which was not aligned with their products and store experience. Such misgivings, may have contributed to Apple’s internal focus of creating its "homemade" ad agency.
Though Google has
a Creative Labs staffed by about 100 people and Red Bull has created events
like Felix Baumgartner's 2012 space jump without an ad agency, creating a
full-fledged, in-house ad agency is rare. We can just wait and see whether this
critical decision will prove fruitful for Apple’s ad campaigns. It is
definitely a risk, but Apple is a unique case, I am pretty sure that they know
what they’re doing…
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