Apple marketing

Commuters trudging through Grand Central Station in New York City got an eyeful of Apple TV+ series Severance on Tuesday. That’s because employees of the bizarre workplace dramedy’s fictional Lumon Industries appeared to work on Lumon terminals behind glass for all to see in the historic train terminal’s grand halls.

Severance stars Adam Scott, Zach Cherry and Britt Lower entered the fake Lumon workspace Tuesday afternoon. And soon enough, Patricia Arquette and Tramell Tillman appeared. Earlier in the day, other people staffed the workstations.

That promotional stunt and a new “Lumon Is Listening” video, which promotes Lumon’s Severance brain surgery as a work-life balance solution, go hand-in-hand with the show’s own creepy weirdness. Check out the images and video below!

The Apple TV+ marketing department sure kept itself busy Tuesday. A space-suited denizen of the streamer’s hit sci-fi series Silo showed up in the stands at an NBA game ahead of the show’s season two finale, which arrives Friday.

Earlier Tuesday, a Severance office popped up in New York City’s Grand Central Station. The pop-up drew stars from the show as well as plenty of curious commuters ahead of the Severance season two premiere, which also arrives Friday on Apple TV+.

Apple TV+ ran a full-court press on the promo stunts this week, a departure from the norm. What else could be in store?

July 27, 1955: Joanna Hoffman, who will join the original Macintosh and NeXT teams and become Steve Jobs’ first right-hand woman, is born in Poland.

Six months younger than Jobs, the marketing executive is one of the few people willing and able to stand up to the oftentimes-fierce Apple co-founder during the first part of his career.

June 10, 1977: Apple Computer Inc. ships its first Apple II computer.

A hulking beige mammoth with 4KB of RAM (upgradeable to a whopping 48KB), the Apple II is the computer that will define Apple for a generation of fans. Retailing at $1,298, it cost the equivalent of a handful of MacBook Pros today  — even though it seemed a total bargain at the time.

May 21, 2010: Apple quietly ends its award-winning “Get a Mac” ad campaign. Debuting in 2006, the ads starred actor Justin Long as the cool, youthful Mac. Comedian John Hodgman portrayed the stuffy, awkward PC.

Alongside the “Think Different” and iPod “Silhouette” campaigns, “Get a Mac” will become one of the most fondly remembered extended advertising blitzes in Apple history.

April 18, 1996: Apple unveils a massive $15 million promotional tie-in for the Mission: Impossible movie starring Tom Cruise.

Designed to promote the PowerBook, which Cruise uses in the spy flick, the marketing campaign comes at a particularly bad time. Attempting to climb back into the black after reporting its largest quarterly loss ever, Apple is in the middle of trying to perform its very own impossible mission. And that’s just the start of the problems.

Beats and Major League Soccer (MLS) struck a multi-year deal Monday to make the Apple headphones subidiary the official consumer audio products partner of the league. That will include eight custom-branded Beats headphones for MLS teams delivered initially. Headphones for the other 22 clubs will follow.

“We are extremely excited to join forces with the MLS, one of the fastest growing and most dynamic sports leagues in the world,” said Chris Thorne, Beats CMO. “Beats will be working closely with the MLS clubs and top players to deliver amazing experiences throughout the upcoming season.”

February 1, 2010: The tech-loving world goes into meltdown at the sight of comedian Stephen Colbert using a prerelease iPad to read nominations during the Grammy Awards show.

“Jay-Z, did you not get one of these in your gift bag?” Colbert quips from the stage. “Am I cooler than you?”

The celebrity sneak peek is all part of Apple’s big (and wildly successful) plan to hype its upcoming tablet.

Check out Apple’s new video for the Vision Pro: It’ll definitely give you FOMO. Labeled a “guided tour,” the 10-minute video shows a newbie user testing the AR/VR headset for the first time.

You’ll see lots of moments where the newbie gasps with Steve Jobs’ famous childlike wonder. But while Vision Pro looks amazing for consuming media, the video suspiciously skips over work you might do with Apple’s new spatial computer. It’s mentioned, but briefly: Here’s your workspace, now let’s watch Godzilla!

Even if you have zero interest in buying a $3,499 mixed-reality headset, you should stop right now and watch the new Making Apple Vision Pro video. It’s an absolutely mesmerizing video that shows the elaborate manufacturing process for Apple’s upcoming “spatial computing” device.

It takes just over a minute to watch, and it’s truly stunning!

Apple execs uttered the term “5G” so many times during Tuesday’s iPhone 12 unveiling that they could have triggered semantic satiation. (That’s when you hear something so many times that it starts to sound … really weird.)

If their repetition of the word didn’t burn 5G into your brain — or turn your gray matter into mush — the 5G supercuts that followed certainly will.

Question: How do you get billboards for a new product up as quickly as possible after launch, without spoiling Apple’s perfectly orchestrated unveiling? Answer: You put up the billboard, then add the product afterward.

If that sounds like way too much effort, we’re guessing you won’t be hearing back from Apple about your marketing job application anytime soon.

Excerpted from Live from Cupertino: How Apple Used Words, Music, and Performance to Build the World’s Best Sales Machine by Michael Hageloh and Tim Vandehey.

Prologue: What were once devices are now habits

When I set out to write this book, one of my goals was to see if I could insult fifty million people in one sentence. Here goes. Years ago, before I was excommunicated from New York City and became a resident of Texas (a state so backward that someone in our town once asked my wife and me if being Jewish was like being Catholic), I lived in Florida, which is so appealing to the unbalanced that when I took the “Florida Challenge” (where you google “Florida man” and your birthday to see what kind of headlines pop up) for April 24, the first result read, “Florida man kisses venomous snake and is immediately bitten on the lips.”

Mission accomplished. Now, let’s move on.

Cupertino’s marketing department unleashed a slew of fancy new Apple buzzwords to describe iPhone 11 features landing in stores later this month.

On a podcast this week, I heard the hosts complaining that they get all kinds of spam notifications from Apple. Their iPhones pop up promotional alerts about Apple Pay, apps, Apple Music, Apple Pay, podcasts and more.

“WTF?” I thought, because I don’t get anything like that. I checked through my notification preferences, sure that I’d find something in there, but no. So why wasn’t I getting all this Apple spam?

Because Apple hid the setting. You can turn off all those junky Apple spam notifications. You just have to know where to look.

Apple has received virtually every award there is for advertising and marketing, but one announced this week caught the company by surprise.

The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity announced it would award Apple Creative Marketer of the Year for 2019, a first for the company.

Apple is resorting to very un-Apple marketing strategies to try and bolster sales of this year’s new iPhones, a report claims.

These strategies include discount promotions via “generous” device buyback terms. The company is even moving marketing staff from other projects to try and come up with ways to move the iPhone XR and XS off the shelves. This could be proof positive that the new iPhones haven’t been selling as expected.

Apple and DJ Khaled made a commercial of true cross-promotion genius. Khaled gets to plug his latest single No Brainer by plugging Apple Music. Siri, HomePod and iPhone X also each get a turn to shine.

But stealing the minute-and-half show was Khaled’s toddler son, Asahd, who, with help from the voice of comedian Kevin Hart, is caught with an iPhone X in a highchair nagging his attorney to aggressively negotiate for more money.

Apple challenges Apple Watch users of any age to “close your rings” in a new series of high-energy ads for its smartwatch.

The short, 15-second spots debuted on Apple’s Australian YouTube channel. It’s likely they will roll out internationally before long. Check them out below.

If you think Apple has lost its innovation mojo, these T-shirts are for you.

Throwboy’s new iWantMore line expresses the frustration of anybody irritated by iOS bugs or underwhelmed by the MacBook Pro.

Apple’s pretty darn good when it comes to advertising, and 2017 was no exception. Whether it was Portrait mode, AirPods or the iPhone X, creatives working on Apple ads found new and exciting ways to sell us on Cupertino’s latest innovations.

Check out our picks for the year’s best Apple ads below.

Upgrading to iPhone X means facing a learning curve. Since Apple’s futuristic phone forgoes the familiar home button, iPhone X owners must learn a bunch of gestures.

Apple wants to make the transition as smooth as possible, so the company just uploaded a video to ease the pain of any iPhone X owner shellshocked by all that bright, shiny newness.

Anybody who thinks Apple can’t innovate should look in awe at the fecal hurricane whipped up by the company’s unorthodox iPhone X marketing plan.

By giving popular YouTubers early access to the next-gen iPhone, and allowing them to “scoop” the old-school journalists traditionally granted such preferential treatment, Cupertino upended the typical review cycle.

Apple apparently bruised a few fragile egos in the process. Frankly, it’s hilarious watching the ensuing media meltdown.

The latest rumors about the next-generation Apple Watch indicate it might come with LTE cellular data in a slick new design. But Apple Watch already offers data connectivity via iPhone, and Cupertino’s marketing tends to focus on benefits, not features. So how will Apple craft a new product story around built-in cellular?

My guess is it will all be about replacing the need for a very old technology: pockets. Apple Watch Series 3 will move all the contents of our pockets into the cloud.

Whether it’s adding tree-lined avenues or high-tech display tables for showing off the Apple Watch or iPhone, the design of the Apple Store is constantly changing.

The latest innovation is a giant floor-to-ceiling television display, which can be seen at Apple’s new Saddle Creek Store in Germantown, Tennessee.

And you thought the 12.9-inch iPad Pro had a big screen!